


Arrows and the Night

by Albiona



Series: Arrows and the Night [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Batman (Comics)
Genre: Batfamily Feels, Crossover, Fluff, Gen, Team Arrow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-10 13:19:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 50
Words: 33,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2026545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albiona/pseuds/Albiona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver's broke, Felicity has a new boss, Thea's missing, and Team Arrow slowly meets the Batfamily. Arrow seasons 1 & 2 compliant. Implied Oliver/Felicity. More about teams than cases.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Catch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pumpkinonwheels](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpkinonwheels/gifts).



> Pumpkinonwheels called me this morning to tell me that she she'd just seen Steven Amell signing autographs on the street outside Comic-Con. I thought it boded well to start posting.
> 
> No beta, all mistakes are mine.

A pair of leg binders shot out and wrapped violently around the ankles of a white-masked thug and brought his face into the gravel-strewn rooftop. A sharp zing preceded a cry and another fall. A young man in a red hoodie and mask with a bow and quiver shot as another thug charged him, distracting him from two others.

Their leader, in hand-to-hand combat with the Arrow, lifted his head at the sound, got in a last hard hit, turned, and bolted. The Arrow followed and Roy knocked a thug out with a wide swipe of his bow. The last goon kicked him hard and Roy loosed another arrow that flew wide as he tripped over the low edge of the building, sending him backwards with a shout. Another zing brought the man down and a black-clad vigilante swung around the corner of the building. He grabbed Roy by the ankle. Roy’s head jerked from the sudden change in direction, then banged against the fire escape.

“Oops.”

“Hey,” Roy stuttered, shoving away from the metal and brick, struggling to look up at his rescuer, quiver emptied into the street below. The black-clad man swung from a thick rope attached somewhere unseen.

“Easy big fella,” the newcomer lowered them until Roy was laying on the pavement. Letting go of the gun attached to the rope, he knelt beside Roy. “Where’s your team?”

Roy Harper groaned, scrumming his face with his hand. 

“Who are you?” he mumbled.

“Come on,” the other tapped his face. “Your team. Where are they?” But Roy’s eyes fluttered shut and his head lolled.

“Right,” breathed the masked one, looking down the alley. “Okay, kiddo.” He leaned over and hauled him up. “Come on.”


	2. Release

Inside the van, Felicity watched two screens and huddled in her black coat.

“Have you got him?” she asked.

_Transmitting now_ , gruffed the Arrow into her earpiece. A grey window popped up and a blue progress bar rushed to fill as she began typing.

“It’s the right account,” she said. “I’ll have to follow the dummies but this should do it.”

A pause.

_Call Detective Lance. We’re done here._

A knock sounded on the side of the van. The blonde shrieked, falling back.

_Felicity?_

“Oliver,” she breathed. “Someone just knocked on the van.”

_I’m on the way,_ he started, gravel crunching as he ran back across the rooftop. _Roy, get back to Felicity._

Silence.

_Roy!_

Another knock.

“Oliver, please hurry,” she breathed.

“I can hear you,” came a voice. “I know Team Arrow’s in there. It’s okay, I just want to return your guy in the red hoodie.”

Slowly, so slowly, Felicity crept into the front of the van and looked out the passenger window. Roy slumped unconscious against the brick wall. A face wrapped in dark hair and a black mask appeared opposite the glass. Felicity's eyes rounded behind her glasses and she ducked out of sight.

_Felicity, what’s happening?_

“He’s outside. I- I can see Roy. He’s not moving.”

The man in the mask waved and grinned. He backed up and let Felicity see all of him. His suit was entirely black in the same tight material from his boots to his neck, except for a symmetrical sweep of iridescent blue across his chest, onto his shoulders, and down through two of his fingertips. “You know, I could just open the van,” he said. “But it’d be more polite if you’d do it.”

_Who?_

“He’s wearing a mask.”

_I’m almost there. Stay down._

“Hey,” the vigilante said. “Could you ask Robin Hood not to shoot at me? I brought your kid back and I caught your perps.” He pointed down the alley.

Felicity followed the line of his finger, looking through the windshield. Four thugs hung by their ankles from the fire escape. She snapped her head back to look at the vigilante, leaning against the wall beside Roy and still smiling.

“How’d you do that?” she asked.

If anything, his smile widened.

“Arrow,” she said, touching her earpiece. “Don’t shoot him. I think he’s trying to help.”

When Starling’s gruffest vigilante burst into the alley seconds later, bow string taut, the other vigilante lifted his hands and straightened.

“Who are you?” the Arrow demanded.

“Nightwing.”

The Arrow approached and Felicity threw open the door, climbing out.

“Get back in the van, Felicity,” the hooded one said. She ignored him, crossing in front of Nightwing and kneeling by Roy, checking for a pulse.

“Caught your perps and your boy wonder,” Nightwing said, looking at the blonde but addressing the leader. “He hit his head but he’ll be fine. That ought to at least buy me two minutes.”

“He’s breathing,” Felicity confirmed.

“How do we know you didn’t knock him out?” said the Arrow.

“The kid’ll tell you when he wakes up. It shouldn’t be long.” He leapt onto the hood of the van and sat, cross-legged. Felicity smirked.

The Arrow considered, moving between his teammates and the newcomer, then demanded, “Talk.”

“Someone’s been selling a highly addictive drug to dealers who like to hang out at playgrounds and schools in Bludhaven. I’ve tracked the shipments from these docks. I want whoever’s targeting kids in my city.”

“Do you have a name?” Felicity asked. 

“The Count. I understand you had some dealings with him last year.” Nightwing produced a small clear bag, showed it to the air, then tossed it to Felicity, who fumbled it. The Arrow laxed his bow slightly. “Best I can tell, it’s the same chemical composition as the vertigo that was hitting all the clubs and parties last year here in Starling.”

“The Count’s dead,” said the Arrow.

“Three arrows to the chest and a fall out of a skyscraper, he ought to be dead. But the chemical signature’s the same. I don’t care if it’s him or an underling or a knock-off. I want the shipments to stop.”

“You want to continue to protect kids in your city, get out of mine,” the Arrow pulled his bow taut again. Roy stirred. Felicity touched his face and bit her lip, eyes shuttering sideways toward Nightwing, then back to Roy.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Walk it off, kiddo,” Nightwing advised, still perched on the hood of the van. “Unless you have a concussion. In that case, stay right there.”

“You. You saved me,” said Roy, blinking at the new vigilante.

Nightwing smirked at the Arrow. “Toldja.”

Roy struggled to walk himself up the wall with his hands and Felicity’s help. She led him to the van and Nightwing stood to hold open the passenger door. Roy paused and extended his hand. The newcomer shook it. “Thanks,” Roy said. When he was laying down beside Felicity’s chair, Nightwing met the Arrow’s glare.

“We’ll look into it,” said the Arrow.

Nightwing nodded, dropping into amicability again. “Thanks. I’ll be back for an update soon. Take it easy, Red.” To the woman he added, “It was nice to meet you, Felicity.”

He crossed in front of the van, tapping out a rhythm on the hood. Roy launched himself back to the door and threw up. When the Arrow and Felicity looked back, Nightwing had disappeared. The Arrow ran forward, searching the shadows.

“He pulled a you,” Felicity enthused.


	3. Stay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be posting chapters in clusters based on the story's chronology. Please let me know what you think!

In the new lair, where Felicity and Digg had found Oliver all those months ago, where he’d escaped to and only Amanda Waller and ARGUS could find him, Felicity pushed her cell phone into her pocket and stepped into the cement room with its low ceiling. Oliver stood, hood down and mask off, with a hand on Roy’s shoulder. The younger sat bent in a chair over a trashcan.

“Digg’s never heard of him,” she said to the others. “But he and Lyla got the deed to the Foundry back in your name.”

Oliver nodded. “Good. But I don’t want us using it. Too many people know about it.”

“Plus we can’t afford the electric bill and there’s no one to run the club,” said Felicity. To Roy she cringed, “How’re you feeling?”

He looked up, pale, and nodded.

“Felicity, after you get off work tomorrow I want you and Roy to go by and bring back whatever equipment is left.”

“Okay. That’s good, actually. I might need the broad-spectrum centrifuge, what with the drugs and the concussions,” she finished.

“Are you going after Nightwing?” asked Roy.

The Arrow paused.

“I’ll decide once we know more. For now, rest. Go home.”

“He can’t go home,” Felicity said, shocked. “Oliver, he’s throwing up. He has a concussion. He can’t go home. He has to stay here where we can ask him what year it is at regular intervals.”

The Queen let out a slow breath, his mouth a thin line.

“Take the cot, then,” he said.

“What about you?” asked Roy.

“I’ll be fine.”

Oliver clapped him on the back and helped him rise. Roy picked up the bin and took it with him, shuffling. Felicity watched him go, stepping nearer to Oliver.

“He’s going to be okay. Right?” she asked.

“He’ll be fine, Felicity.” She nodded and he faced her. “What have you found out?”

She sighed, heading toward her computer.

“Not much. The drugs are the same chemical composition in the exact same proportions as the Count’s vertigo.”

“Is there anything in it you can track?”

“Maybe. If they’re manufacturing it here in Starling, we might be able to find the location, at least.”

Roy retched, leaning off of the cot and Oliver stopped cold. He sighed.

“It’s late,” said Oliver. “Go on home.” He stepped toward Roy.

“Wait,” she said and he faced her again, soft. His hand lifted to her elbow, drawing her further in, both of them unconscious to it. “What are you going to do? Roy’s in your bed.”

Oliver shook his head slightly.

“It’s fine. I’ll stay up. See what I can find out.”

She nodded.

“You know, I can stay a little longer.”

“You have work in the morning,” he reminded her gently. She shrugged.

“I’m not that tired. I’ll stay. At least until I run a few more searches.”

Oliver grinned, gentleness in every feature as only she can summon it. Smiling, she backed into her chair and attended to the computers.


	4. Start

Felicity rode the executive elevator to the top floor of Queen Consolidated ten minutes early. She breathed deeply, eyes shut, running her mind over Oliver’s scars to calm her. She wouldn’t have thought this would work, since scars mean shirtless and usually sweaty and it _is_ Oliver Queen, but they also mean his experience and their safety—mental and physical.

There was the tattoo, of course. The jagged, curved scar on his abdomen. The thin one at his shoulder that started all of this, where his mother had shot him.

She breathed.

The two on his bicep. The burn on one side of his chest. The double slash on the other.

The elevator dinged. Felicity passed the regular elevators and walked into her office—the secretary’s office. Several cardboard boxes sat empty on the floor.

The new CEO saw her and rose from the desk. She waited for him to arrive.

“Ms. Smoak,” he smiled, toothy and self-assured in a good black suit, dark brown hair. He shook her hand. “Good to see you again.”

The last time had been when he out-bid Oliver, Laurel, and Walter’s combined capital and convinced the board that he’d make a better, more stable CEO.

“Mr. Palmer,” she greeted him, cool. “Do you know what are these boxes doing here? On the floor? Of my office?”

An eyebrow quirked up at her.

“I intend to hire my own assistant by the end of the week. I thought you might like to go ahead and get some things packed so I had these brought up for you. In the meantime, I would like you to mostly handle the phones.”

She balked. He softened, which infuriated her.

“I understand that you came from the IT department,” he said. “Perhaps they have an opening for you. Feel free to look into it. I would be happy to sign a transfer if the head is amenable to it.”

With another smile he went back into his office. The door swung shut and she was still standing there.

Incensed, Felicity pushed the glass door open and followed him.

“I am very good at my job,” she declared.

“Oliver Queen must have believed so,” said Ray Palmer, unfazed, but did her the courtesy of remaining standing. “However, I fail to see how you're qualified for your current position.”

She glared at him.

“Mr. Queen moved me here because he needed the technological help,” she said. “He could barely enter a WiFi password on his own. I took it and I am very good at it.”

“Apparently the board thought your appointment was overkill,” he returned, calm. “They agreed that I have the right to select my own assistant.”

She just looked at him. The board had been talking about her move? She knew the entire company thought she and Oliver were sleeping together, that that’s why she’d gotten the new position. She’d fought it so hard then because she isn’t stupid; she knew it would wreck her credibility within the company and probably outside of it. But the board? She hadn’t planned on a time when Oliver wouldn’t be CEO. Even after Isabel happened, Felicity had refused to believe that Oliver might not regain the company. Not that she would have made a single different choice if she’d known.

“Why did you accept?” Palmer asked. “Since WiFi passwords are so clearly beneath you.”

She breathed. This. This is her secret identity, the only one she has at the moment, and Oliver still needs her to keep it up.

“Once I saw his limitations, I was concerned for the well-being of the company,” she said. “I accepted this job—which, you're right, is beneath me—to do what was best for Queen Consolidated. It also happens that I turned it into something I am very good at doing.”

He watched her, the passion slipping slowly out of her as no new assault came.

“Very well. Thank you, Ms. Smoak,” he said.

She blinked back, startled.

“So. So, you’re not firing me?”

He smirked at her floundering.

“For now, no,” he said softly. With more weight he said, “I want the quarterly, semi-annual, and annual reports for the past seven years and the minutes from every board meeting for the past ten years. I also want a full inventory of everything in the Applied Sciences facility that was blown up before the uprising.”

Felicity nodded, “Yes, Sir,” she said. 

She spun on one heel but at the door she turned back.

“Despite everything I just said, I want you to understand that Mr. Queen is a good person. In all the time I worked for him and all the time I've known him, he has always tried to do the right thing.”

Palmer maintained eye contact despite his surprise. She was about to step fully out when he spoke.

“And yet, his lack of judgment lost him the company.”

She opened her mouth to speak, stopped.

“You don't know everything that happened,” she said. “It’s a miracle that he's even still alive. Losing the company is nothing compared with that.”

Then she did leave, dread growing that she'd said far too much.


	5. Check

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think!

Roy descended the stairs from Verdant into the Foundry. Two boxes and several pieces of machinery sat on the two tables not covered by sheets.

“What else?” he asked.

“Just the base to this and whatever’s left of the vodka I swiped,” said Felicity.

He grinned and took the centrifuge.

“Probably not much, then,” he said, climbing up the steps.

Felicity picked up the boxes with a gentle tickling of glass.

“Felicity.”

Her head snapped up. Nightwing stood between her and the salmon ladder. 

“Uh,” she shot a look up the stairs and into Verdant.

“I’m sorry to startle you. May I help?” he asked, gesturing to the box.

“Oh. No, that’s okay,” she forced a laugh and the box rattled. She shut her eyes tightly. “I’ve got it.”

He cocked his head at her. “Unfortunately, someone raised me to be a gentleman. So,” he bowed. “Please? May I carry your boxes for you?”

“Uh,” she looked down at it. “No. I don’t need you to and I don’t think the Arrow would like you to.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Now that is a real concern I hadn’t considered.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“I stopped by to see if you’d found out anything.”

She sat the vodka down, keeping most of her body facing him, wary.

“I think you need to discuss that with the Arrow.”

“But,” he said slowly, a little regretfully, “he’s not here.”

“Of course he,” her refusal died but she finished the useless lie anyway, “is.”

Nightwing lifted a corner of his mouth.

“Red’s up there. But you’re both clearly moving things out, Felicity. Not in. This isn’t your home base anymore. And I’ve been here for over an hour. Just you two.”

“Let me call him,” Felicity said, backing toward the stairs.

“No need,” the Arrow emerged from the shadows of Verdant, glaring at Nightwing, his arrow notched.

The temperature shifted and Nightwing lowered his shoulders, giving a nod to the Arrow with both hands up.

“I’m just checking in,” he said. Roy rounded the corner and descended behind the Arrow, dragging his hood up over his face.

Felicity took several steps backward to stand beside the Arrow. Roy joined them on her other side and Nightwing kept smiling.

“If the centrifuge is any indicator, you’re still running tests,” said the dark-haired man. “Anything to share with the class?”

The Arrow’s lips pressed.

“We’re still looking into it,” he said.

Nightwing nodded.

“Please forgive the intrusion,” he said. “I would have knocked but Felicity didn’t let me in last time.” 

“Wait,” Felicity stopped him, trepidation creeping into her voice. Her ponytail trembled but she stepped forward. “How'd you know to come here to find us?”

Without the lit sign out front, the club looked as abandoned as when Oliver’d first seen it with Tommy, after the island. Its noise and vibrancy had, quite literally, been their cover. Now, they shouldn’t stay too long. There was no logical reason for anyone to be there, let alone two masked men.

Nightwing paused.

“The Huntress,” he said.

“Oh,” Felicity started, twisting to look at the Arrow, “We, uh. We aren't exactly friends.”

Nightwing grinned. “I know.”

“She’s untrustworthy,” gruffed the Arrow.

“Yeah.”

“And a psychopath,” Felicity mumbled.

“We’re working on that,” said Nightwing.

“‘We’?” Felicity blinked, “You and the Huntress are a ‘we’?”

Nightwing folded his arms and leaned back against the table, still smiling.

“No. Different ‘we.’”

“How do you know her?” Roy asked. The Arrow eyed him.

Nightwing waited a beat before answering.

“She showed up a couple of years ago, first in my city, then in my old city. We have a number of vigilantes already, but not so many that someone new goes unnoticed. She and I didn’t get along.”

“Why not?”

“She killed.”

Team Arrow exchanged a look.

“What did she tell you about us?” Felicity asked.

“Last year,” said Nightwing, “she dropped off for a few days. When she came back, she was different. Better. She said she’d been to Starling. So, when I decided to come, I did my research and I asked her where to find you. She told me to come here.”

“How’d you even know she knew us?”

“Vigilantes tend to know other vigilantes,” he said. Then he smirked, “Plus a couple of police reports.”

An ambulance siren sounded a few blocks away and everyone stilled, listening. His amusement dropped away.

“Since last night I ran down a lead: an unusual number of container ships coming in through the same dock, most of them from El Salvador.”

“What’d you turn up?”

“Not much, but I tagged their trucks.”

“Which dock?” asked Arrow.

“Seventeen,” Nightwing said. “Manifests put another container ship in to that dock tonight. Will I see you there?”

“No.”

Roy’s eyes skittered up to his mentor and Felicity eyed him. 

“Because you won’t be there,” the Arrow continued. “If the drugs are coming in here, _we_ will stop it.”

Nightwing did not answer. Finally, he nodded.

“If the trucks start moving,” he said, “I’m taking them out.”

“Do it outside of Starling,” the Arrow instructed.

Nightwing tensed and frowned. He stepped once to his left, widening his stance.

"Give us to the city limit," said Felicity. "If anything makes it past us, it's yours."

The Arrow pursed his lips at her, his jaw set. Clearly he didn't appreciate the insinuation that they might fail to stop the trucks.

“I’ll hit them on the road,” Nightwing agreed, “before they reach my city.”

“Bludhaven?” Felicity asked.

A pause. The other vigilante struck her with such an intense look that she squirmed but found she couldn’t break the gaze.

“Bludhaven.”

Nightwing had actually been photographed quite often in Bludhaven, even appearing on the news, and he had a dedicated fansite called “Nightwatch” that spun elaborate theories as to his identity, origins, and relationships with other vigilantes. But to have him admit which city he calls home felt like an offering of trust.

“Good,” said the hooded vigilante with finality. “We’ll be in touch.”

Nightwing chuckled.

“Is that a subtle way of saying, ‘Stop flirting with my partner and get out of my secret hideout’?” he asked. The Arrow’s mouth quivered, nearly scowling, nearly smiling.

“Get out of my city,” Arrow said instead.

“Fair enough,” Nightwing answered. “Thank you.”

The Arrow nodded, as did Roy, and Felicity smiled. Because of what happened in the alley, Felicity expected Nightwing to slip away somehow. Instant darkness powder or a diversion of pigeons, maybe. He’d shown up in much the same way he’d last gone. But now he just grinned at them and strolled up the steps. He rounded the same corner the Arrow and Roy had used, but he must have lifted into the air, because the sound of his footsteps disappeared as soon as he left their sight.


	6. Distract

Roy took a glass from the waiter and leaned against the wall beside a wide silver-framed mirror. Everything depended on tonight if you believed Mr. Steele. Without garnering financial backers for some new Glades revitalization campaign, Oliver Queen would never regain the clout or the money he’d need to return to his prior lifestyle. Not the playboy billionaire one, the CEO/vigilante one. But Walter Steele didn’t understand that distinction.

Because he has so little to offer anyone at the moment, Oliver nearly insisted that they all come. Felicity had to be there anyway with the new head of Queen Consolidated. Diggle was hanging out by the security teams. Oliver was playing his part. So Roy was drinking and leaning against the wall, trying not to miss Thea but lonely and, of course, wishing she was there. A small part of his mind wondered what was taking her so long to come back to him, as if she she’d stepped away to the bathroom or something.

He knew he wasn’t doing well.

“You’re the one. I can tell.”

Roy swallowed and faced a woman, young and beautiful and smiling at him.

“Sorry?”

“You’re the one person who would rather be almost anywhere else than here. There’s always one,” she leaned against the wall beside him, her shoulders just below the bottom on the mirror. She’d left plenty of distance between them but still, he wasn’t alone anymore.

“Does it show that easily?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“There’s always one,” she repeated. “Why’s it so bad?”

He took a sip. Just a sip.

“I usually go to these things with my girlfriend. But, uh,” he mimed taking another sip, “she’s out of town tonight.”

“Bummer,” she said and actually grimaced for him. “You should probably break up with her for abandoning you.”

His head snapped to her but the left corner of her mouth was quirked up. He let his nerves out in a burst like a chuckle and she smiled.

“There you go,” she said. “You are no longer ‘the one.’”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” she affirmed.

“So who is it now?” he scanned the room.

She finished her glass.

“Me, probably.”

Roy looked closer at her.

“Why?”

“Same reason as you. My boyfriend’s not with me and the man I came with is off being boring and business-y.”

Roy frowned. “Who’d you come with?”

“My brother,” she indicated a tall man with carefully combed dark hair wearing a crisply tailored tuxedo. Roy’s stomach clenched at her words. “He and his girlfriend split a few months ago and you and I both know these things suck by yourself.”

He breathed. She was shorter than Thea with wider shoulders and more muscles overall. Her hair was sort of similar, and she was there with her business-minded brother, which probably means she has money like the Queens. Well, maybe not that much money.

“You’re a good sister,” he said.

“He doesn’t actually need me,” she returned, dropping her empty glass on the tray of a passing server. “So! Why are you here?”

Roy nodded toward Oliver, whose latest story was earning appreciative chortles from two older men in suits.

“A friend invited me.”

She appraised Mr. Queen and nodded.

“I can see how he’d be hard to turn down,” she said.

“You’ve no idea.”

She grinned for a moment, then said, “I’m Stephanie.”

“Roy.”

“Roy, I’m going to ask something of you. Are you ready?”

He blinked, forcing himself not to back away or move away from the wall. She cracked her thumbs and bit her lip.

“Uh. Okay,” he said.

“I like to dance at these things. It’s the best part, since the rich don’t actually eat apparently. And, I am without my usual partner. Would you dance with me?”

He let a breath out, tucking his empty hand deep into his pocket. 

“I don’t really dance,” he said.

“Your girlfriend never made you learn?” she teased.

If only that were true. 

“No, she did,” he laughed. “I’m just not very good.”

Even as he said it his pride bucked. Off the mirakuru and not terrified of hurting Thea with his pinkie, and more coordinated thanks to Arrow training, Roy suspected that he might be a pretty good dancer now. Better, anyway.

“You’ll be plenty good enough for me,” said Stephanie.

She extended her hand. Roy looked at it, then back up. She was just enough like Thea to remind him and everything else was a distraction.

He took her hand.


	7. Over

Returning to the main room of Walter’s penthouse, Oliver reviewed the fare. The vapid and conceited of Starling’s uppercrust, socialites, entrepreneurs, and even a few very rich faces from further afield. His eyes lit on Felicity and his spine prickled. Her entire demeanor bespoke hostility. Working his way toward her, Oliver made out the profile of the man she spoke to: Palmer. She’d come home—well, to Oliver’s temporary home—every day for three weeks complaining about him. He smiled too much in Oliver’s estimation, rather like Nightwing.

Thankfully, that vigilante hadn’t reappeared in Starling.

With a flash, Oliver sized Palmer up, examining the breadth of his shoulders, his muscle tone beneath his tux, his grace, his height.

No. He’s taller than Nightwing and narrower across. His tone is good but he’s not unduly graceful.

Oliver smiled at a pair of elderly women and moved forward, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, but especially Felicity.

“You're loyal. I value that quality,” said Palmer. “But I also need you to be discerning.”

“I am being discerning. I have discerned that you are wiping information off Queen Consolidated designated servers and replacing it with dummy projects.”

Palmer towered over her.

“And how would you know that?”

Oliver stepped forward, jaw set, and someone called his name. He stopped, glaring at Palmer. 

“MIT,” said Felicity. Then, startling herself, “Is this why you were going to fire me?”

“Ollie,” said Laurel, smiling and immaculate and beautiful. He forced a smile and stretched his hand across her back.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Palmer said, backing away.

Relief washed through Oliver and he kissed Laurel on the cheek.

Felicity frowned at Palmer, cocked her jaw to one side, and shut her mouth again.

“You’re hiding something,” she insisted.

Laurel had said something.

Oliver leaned close.

“Sorry. I’m eavesdropping,” he breathed to his friend. “Help me?”

He watched the sentence run through her mind several times before she made sense of it. Surprise, indignation, uncertainty, love.

“Sure,” Laurel said. “What do I do?”

Oliver spun Laurel around so he could see an angle of Felicity and Palmer. The blonde was glaring at her employer as fiercely as she ever had at Oliver.

Palmer deadpanned, “You’re already worried that I’m not keeping you in the loop.” 

“Just pretend to talk to me,” said Oliver. “And don’t get upset if I don’t answer.”

“Not from me, from everyone,” Felicity said. “I don’t know why you’re doing this yet. Maybe I’ll never know, but if it affects the company, then someone will find out.”

Palmer still kept that insatiable grin but he also paled.

“Let me guess. That person will be you.” Palmer challenged. Felicity stared him down and every nerve within Oliver stretched with pride.

“I’m not saying that I’m going to go looking,” she said evenly. “But secrets don’t like staying secrets. Out of everyone who _might_ find out yours, you’d better hope it’s me.”

“Because you’re loyal,” said Palmer. She didn’t answer him right away. Oliver didn’t really expect her to and his eyes focused back on Laurel.

“I’m sorry.” Mr. Queen smiled at his friend. “How are you?”

But then Felicity spoke.

“Because I’m smart,” she returned, low. “And I’m very good at my job.”

Oliver listened to the click of her heels, receding across the floor behind him.

Blinking back into his own skin, Oliver watched his friend’s annoyance fan gently and he schooled his own pleased expression.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Tell me once more, Laurel.”


	8. Under

Walter opened one arm to Oliver, who obliged with a half-interested angle of his head and walked to him.

“Oliver, I want to introduce you to Richard Grayson.” A man a couple years younger than Oliver, with black hair and an enthusiastic smile, reached out his hand. The Queen took it and they exchanged a firm handshake. “He represents Wayne Industries, which is interested in funding our little endeavor.”

“Wonderful,” Oliver smiled, listening to the pleasantries, adding a few, keeping his pasted-on smile pressed firmly, reminding himself that Felicity had dubbed the new lair “The Quiver” and that his actual quiver had a dwindling supply of arrows.

He came back into the present when a young athletic woman detached herself from Roy, actually stepping out of his hand at her back to approach them. She’d clipped her curly blonde hair so that most of it bulged onto one side of the back of her head; Thea did that sometimes for parties. No wonder Roy’d been dancing with her. She touched Grayson’s arm. He grinned down at her.

“Oh, this is my sister,” he said, reaching an arm behind her and drawing her in. “Stephanie Brown.”

“We’re so pleased you could come,” Walter said, all affirmation and grace. It made Oliver’s stomach reel.

“Miss Brown,” Oliver extended his hand.

“A pleasure,” she said, shaking it, “but please call me Stephanie. I’m just the plus one.”

Oliver adopted an innocent expression.

“Wayne, Grayson, Brown. What an interesting family you must have.”

Walter stiffened but the guests laughed.

“Wayne Manor’s full of strays,” Stephanie said. “Dogs, cats, cows, former orphans, former street kids.” She gestured to Richard, “The adopted,” she said, then turned her wrist back toward herself, “And the wards.”

Mr. Queen blinked and altered his stance, his voice softening.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said.

“Not at all.” Mr. Grayson said. “So far none of us have actually taken the Wayne name.”

“But you represent Mr. Wayne’s interests,” said Oliver.

“The company’s interests, yes.”

The young men stared at each other, each looking more pleasant than the other.

“Mr. Steele,” Stephanie spoke up, chipper. “What a beautiful piano.”

Walter smiled, gesturing her that way. “Allow me to show it to you.”

She tapped Richard’s arm as she left him and both young men watched her walk to the instrument by the wide window.

“Call me Dick,” said Mr. Grayson. Mr. Queen nodded with a thin smile. “I don’t like discussing business at a party.”

“How fortunate,” Oliver answered. “Neither do I.”

Dick gestured to a waiter and offered a glass of champagne to the Queen heir, who accepted it with a nod. The Wayne heir then took two glasses.

“So,” Dick said. “Can you recommend a lady who might like a drink?”

Oliver pressed a careful smile and glared away from him.

“How about her?” Dick gestured to the tall blonde former assistant walking toward the piano, drawn to Walter or the woman or the tune she promised by seating herself on the bench. At the bare expression on Oliver’s face, Dick chuckled.

“Okay, not her. What about her?” he gestured to a brunette with a round face.

“Laurel,” Oliver said after a moment. He nodded back to the window. “And she’s Felicity. My assistant.”

Dick nodded. Stephanie gleamed from the piano, all efficacy and smiles. Walter stayed near her shoulder, looking fond as she pressed the ivory gently, learning the piano’s voice.

“You can still afford an assistant?” Dick asked, his neck bent conspiratorially.

Oliver glared at him, jaw set.

Mr. Grayson laughed. “I’m kidding. I can actually relate. I got cut off once, became a cop. You’ll figure out a way to make it all come back to you.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“Sure it does. But just wait. Without money you’ll get bored. The boredom will get you, even if nothing else will.”

Dick winked and walked toward his sister, who’d begun to sing. He handed Walter his spare champagne glass and listened. Already, Stephanie’s heart slipped from her chest and squeezed out onto the keys and into the air with her breath.

She hadn’t warmed up, leaving a rasp on the edge of her voice. He set his own glass down in front of her. She looked at Dick, down, at Felicity, at Oliver, down, at Dick.

Ah. Ms. Smoak likes Mr. Queen at least as much as he does her.

After the chorus, Dick touched Stephanie’s shoulder and picked up the second verse. She continued to play and he sang quietly, until she joined him. They picked over the words, easing toward the chorus, their voices stretching. She inclined her head to him.

He sat beside her on the piano bench, watching her play through the end of the chorus. When only her fingers sang, she lifted her right hand to just her fingertips. After watching her play through two measures, he slipped his right hand below hers and took the part.

It’d been months since he’d played and his fingers were slow to obey him. He scooted closer to her, trying to better his angle on the keys. 

He sang the refrain. By the call and response, they each played with two hands, speaking all the unspoken in the people around them.

The room watched.

When they finished, she scooted away to the edge of the bench and angled to face him as he considered, then pressed out a new melody. He nodded to the glass so she sipped from it and placed it back in front of him. 

She let him sing of a girl with no memory of her loved one. Past the chorus she began to play with him, so softly, her solidarity with a brother who’d lost loved ones. Midway through the second verse she harmonized the tails of his phrases: “cold,” “winter here,” “with you near,” “always be,” “dream in me.”

Pressing into his shoulder, she signaled and he softened so that she sang “I’m losing my memory” over “You” and “your” in his phrase. On and on, the yearning and despair rose out of the music, out of him. She dropped off and then played hard as he sang a veiled pain for his brother, who had died and come back so altered, so wrecked. And that brother hadn’t been the last.

She looked up once at Mr. Queen. Pain writ through his face. He might not know what’s happened to his sister, but he was missing her. Laurel stood behind and watched him.

When Dick ended the song Stephanie hugged one of his arms and lay her head on his shoulder. People clapped. He drained the glass and she laughed to make it okay.

“What do you think?” he asked. She studied the keys and lay her fingers down.

Singing for Laurel, Stephanie realized Dick didn’t know this one. She set her eyes upon Mr. Queen, touched Laurel, and went back to him. He noticed his old friend, then, and stepped back, angled to fold her into his sphere.

“Now our love has lost all its leaves,” Stephanie sang. “The distance is worse when you’re near me.” A tremble came into Laurel. “So go. It hurts more to fall apart slow, to dream about warmth in the cold. Now I’m nothing more than a whisper.”

Looking down to the keys again, Stephanie closed her eyes, listening to them all breathe beneath the music, feeling only Dick’s warmth, solid beside her.

When she finished, he kissed her on the forehead. “How about a happy one?” he asked her.

She nodded. People were still clapping when he started the medley they’d arranged to tease their adopted father. Stephanie joined her brother by the fourth word and kept with him, playing fast.

“Who’s gonna save the world…”

Mr. Queen didn’t appreciate the references to a father’s eyes, golden life, entitlement. He pursed his entire body—his fingertips, his lips, his eyes, his jaw, his elbows, his knees—and glared at them as if they were the sole focus of his distain. They played on, enjoying themselves, singing loudly, jostling each other to reach keys and keep up the tempo. This one is easier with Tim.

They ended in laughter and more applause.

“Please don’t tell our dad we can do that,” Stephanie asked Walter when the clapping had nearly died out.

“Why would I ever keep such a secret?” he asked. “Why would you?”

“He’d make us play at every party,” Dick answered, rising. Stephanie went to claim another dance from Roy, and Dick and Walter played the parts of chums beside the piano until the room began to thin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The songs in this chapter are referenced in this order:
> 
> "Over You" by Ingrid Michaelson  
> "Losing Your Memory" by Ryan Star  
> "Winter" by Kina Grannis  
> "Save the World/ Don't Worry Child" by Pentatonix


	9. Out

Oliver himself walked Dick Grayson and his sister to their car and was surprised to find Roy doing the same. The young man opened the door for the blonde, who said something to make him smile and stepped into the car, her long blue dress disappearing behind deeply tinted windows.

“You should hear something from our offices before Friday,” the young man told Mr. Queen, regaining the latter’s attention.

Oliver lifted a false smile.

“I thought you didn’t mix business with pleasure, Dick.”

He said it like a challenge.

“I said that I prefer not to, not that tonight wasn’t fruitful.”

With a hard smile, Mr. Queen shook the amiable Mr. Grayson’s hand and returned to the front door before Dick had turned the engine over. Roy slipped inside past Oliver, but Mr. Queen stopped in the threshold and looked back to the sportscar, all angles and kinetic energy, until it eased out of the driveway.

As they sped along the darkened street, Stephanie made a call.

“You’re right. He’s definitely the Arrow,” she said. With a glance at Dick in the driver’s seat she added, “And he’s definitely vulnerable.”


	10. Lost

Nightwing found them, the master and the apprentice, early in the evening a month later. Dropping from an overpass into a low crouch, he walked toward them.

Since he’d last been in the city, Team Arrow had taken out three warehouse operations bundling drugs and an entire drug-carrying convoy had been destroyed on a curvy road twenty miles outside the city. Oliver Queen had also received a huge shot of capital from Wayne Industries. His new salary wasn’t enough to retake the mansion, but it let him officially own both lairs and roughly furnish them with chairs, tables, and equipment. Despite it all, he still felt a strong desire to protect The Quiver, to keep it as a retreat. He still slept there.

Felicity had also pointed out that the salmon ladder wouldn’t fit in The Quiver.

Recognizing him, the red one, in his new leather hooded suit, lowered his bow. “You’re back,” he said.

“I need your help,” Nightwing answered, lacking his usual ease the way someone with a headache might well act quiet or subdued. “I’m looking for someone.”

The younger looked to his mentor, who kept his head low in his green hood.

“Who?” the Arrow asked.

“A woman. Black mask. Likes her gadgets,” he paused. “Blonde.”

The younger’s eyes widened in direct proportion to the pouting of his mouth. He watched his mentor.

“What do you want with the Canary?” Arrow demanded. Nightwing frowned.

“Who’s that?”

The Arrow’s chin popped up and all three men stared at each another.

“Must be coincidence,” Nightwing waved it off. “The woman I’m looking for goes by Spoiler. Wears a hooded cape. It’s purple, I think.”

The Arrow turned his face aside.

“Felicity?” he breathed. 

_I’m on it_ , she said, already typing fast.

“Why do you think she’s in Starling?” Arrow asked their visitor.

“Her comms went dark late last night. I got a signal from her bike and I tracked it to an alley near a warehouse in the Glades.” A pause. “Have you seen her?”

 _I’ve got something_ , Felicity came through. _Spoiler is a vigilante operating out of Gotham City. She’s mentioned in a few news articles and a handful of police reports, but nothing going back more than two years and nothing anywhere for a couple of weeks._

Arrow pursed his lips.

“No,” he said.

“Why was she in Starling?” Red asked.

“A case. Someone calling himself The Scarecrow. He likes drugs, too. Hallucinogens according to her notes.”

The Arrow signaled to his protégé, whose focus prickled.

“We’ll look into it,” the Arrow promised.


	11. Aside

Felicity Smoak reentered her office with a stack of files the next afternoon to find Oliver Queen exiting the elevator. She was wearing her favorite dress, maroon with a delicate cutout over her chest. The best part is the wide skirt that flares when she spins. Roy had pointed out that she does it more when she wears that dress. But even her favorite dress couldn't make her day any better.

Oliver grinned at her, as warmly as ever, and she found herself meeting him at the door. He took one elbow in his hand and said her name, as if it’d been more than 8 hours since they’d seen each other. Okay, Oliver helped.

She said his name back to him. “What are you doing here?”

He took a breath and cut his eyes into the main office.

“Well, actually I was hoping to speak to Mr. Palmer.”

“He’s in a meeting,” she answered immediately.

He pursed his lips and nodded. “I see.”

She breathed and drew him inside.

“Have you heard anything else? About our,” she pulled a face, “nighttime friend?”

He shook his head.

“Maybe I can make an appointment,” he said.

She frowned at him, then snapped her fingers.

“With Palmer.” Oliver nodded. “Let’s check.”

She led the way to her desk, spun into her chair and lifted her tablet, and Oliver scrubbed his hand over the lower half of his face to hide his smile.

“Actually,” she faced him, spinning in her chair, “I don’t know where Palmer is. His planner said he has a meeting but he didn’t tell me where or with whom. I’ve already hacked his emails and cell and I’ve ransacked his desk but I have no idea where he is.”

She breathed in sharply, looking away, and Oliver set his hand on her shoulder.

“Not for lack of trying,” he grinned.

“But why wouldn’t I know? It was on his work calendar, so he wanted me to see it but the only reason he wouldn’t tell me where is because he’s hiding something. He didn’t take a company car so there isn’t even a GPS to hack.”

He said her name and leaned against her desk. 

“It’s probably nothing,” Oliver said. 

“It’s not nothing,” she murmured, meeting his gaze over the top of her glasses. 

“Then we’ll look into it,” he murmured back. 

She nodded, turned back to her tablet, the multi-colored calendar

“I still wish it were you,” her eyes slid to the office next door. Her voice grew high, steady but with a fragile edge he truly loathed hearing. “Every day, every time I see him in there. Every time I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. Every time he says my name. I wish it were you.” 

He rubbed a small circle on her shoulder. He even leaned down and took her hand with his other hand. He squeezed. She blinked moisture away and met his eyes again.

“Me, too,” he said.

She smiled. She breathed. She blinked back to her computer.

“How about a week from Tuesday?” she asked. He nodded.

“Perfect.”

“And what’s the nature of the meeting?”

“Investment opportunities. I received a missive from Wayne Enterprises I’d like to discuss with him.”

She typed and said, one side of her mouth quirked up, “I will have to ask Palmer if he wants to keep the meeting.”

“I know,” Oliver said. Her typing broke off.

“Isn’t it weird that Wayne Enterprises is suddenly interested in Starling City?” she said to him. “Palmer had me pull meeting minutes for the past ten years. There wasn’t even so much as a mention of Bruce Wayne. Then one party with one of Wayne’s sons and now Wayne execs are throwing opportunities at Queen Consolidated and at you. Richard Grayson barely even spoke to Palmer that night.”

Oliver’s phone buzzed. He took it out, still frowning.

“It’s Digg. I need to go.”

He stood and was halfway to the door before he realized where he was and turned back.

“Felicity,” he said, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, “I do want to talk more about this.”

She nodded. “Tonight,” she said. His phone buzzed in his hand.

“I hope so,” he said. Oliver gave her a small smile and watched her face until he reached the door. When he opened it, he spun, his suit coat flying open as he did, and he answered.

“Oliver Queen.”

Felicity watched him walk to the executive elevator, then back away and press the down button for the regular elevators. She didn’t look away until he met her eyes and stepped through the gap and out of her sight.


	12. Trust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay before these chapters. "Aside" was giving me trouble. Let me know what you think.

Felicity descended into The Foundry. She swiped something away on her tablet, a bag of Big Belly Burgers tucked under her arm for a collective dinner. Glancing up, she gasped and stumbled to a stop. Nightwing was hanging upside down by the highest V of the salmon ladder. The Arrow stood near the dummy taping up Roy’s hands. They both wore masks.

He nodded to let her know this was okay. So much for talking tonight.

Diggle watched from the edge of the practice mats. Apparently, he and Oliver had fought again, both physically and verbally. Dig glared at Oliver but spared a loose smile for Felicity.

“What are you doing?” she called up to their guest. He bent his back and looked at her, then smirked.

“Would you throw something at me if I said I was hanging out?”

She smirked back. “Maybe just an arrow.”

He kicked off from the bar and flipped, landing in a low crouch.

“Geez,” she stared, wide-eyed at him, the light reflecting off of the sapphire blue in his suit.

“I like to climb,” he rose and stepped forward, filling the room with his presence. 

“I noticed.”

She shook herself loose to cross the room with his warm presence so close to her back. 

“Did you find out anything?” he asked as she sat at her computer.

She dug into the bag for a fistful of fries and set it beside her mouse. 

“The trace is coming up now,” she said, lifting the best window onto the center monitor. A flag popped into their view as the computer matched chemical traces to locations in the city’s water system.

He leaned past her, peering at the information, the map. He smelled faintly, a husky scent loose with sweat. If he’s like Oliver, he trains when anxious. She’s actually surprised he doesn’t smell worse. Is his suit machine washable?

They had to Febreeze and air out the arrow suits. 

She leaned towards Nightwing. Okay, maybe he did smell worse. He must have been working out a lot, and he must have been driving Oliver to distraction if he let Nightwing in. And on the salmon ladder. 

“Who is she?” Felicity asked softly, her heart behind her eyes. “I mean, to you. Who is she to you?”

He studied her until her softness convinced him that curiosity was her only motivator.

“It’s complicated,” he said. Felicity snapped her eyes back to the screen, frowning slightly.

He stretched, crossing his arms.

“Sister, I guess,” he said.

When he didn’t elaborate she repeated the word to herself and forced her eyes to focus on the screen until one flag in the Glades made Felicity inhale and start typing.


	13. Found

The Arrow dropped the last goon but the Scarecrow was already gone.

“Spoiler,” Nightwing leapt over the table, dropping in front of her. He pushed up at the metal shield around her face but it didn’t move.

Looking for a control mechanism, he cut the power with an escrima stick and tried the shield again. The red Arrow helped him unfasten the leather straps that held her in place and the green Arrow covered them.

“Spoiler,” Nightwing held onto her arm and ducked his head, coming up beside hers. Blank screens faced them. The black around her eyes had run and her straight blonde hair stuck in her sweat to her forehead, behind her ears, along her neck.

He said her name again. She took a deep breath and shifted, then opened her blue eyes to slits. She blinked them open.

“Nightwing,”

“Hey, kiddo. You’re all right now,” he popped his head back out. Seeing her mask, he seized it off the table and ducked back under the shield.

Cupping the back of her neck with one hand, he lifted the strap of the mask over her head with the other. When it was in place, she pulled it sideways, squaring it better to her eyes. Nightwing lifted the purple of her cape around her face and tucked her hair back, pushing it behind her ears and out of sight.

“Keep your hood up,” he said, putting both arms around her and lifting her weight from the metal braces. Her eyes fluttered shut, groaning softly. She brought both arms around Nightwing’s iridescent blue shoulders and he lifted her off the leg supports.

All her weight fell against him. She pushed against the floor, forcing her muscles to take her.

When she’d gained some purchase, Nightwing told her, “Okay, we’re going to duck and we’ll be with the Arrow and Red.” She nodded.

Felicity didn’t hear a response, just a scrape as Spoiler’s leg pushed against the brace, and she waited, fascinated by the tenderness she heard between them.

“Hurry,” Oliver’s gravel tone startled Felicity. She looked back at Digg, who stood with his arms crossed, listening, jaw tight, staring at a set of arrows.

Apparently Oliver startled Spoiler, too. She seized one of Nightwing’s escrima sticks, knocking Red Arrow to the ground before throwing it at his mentor, who batted it out of the way.

“Spoiler, no!” Nightwing seized both her arms and put himself bodily between her and the men she’d attacked. “It’s the Arrow. It’s just the Arrow,” he said.

She opened wide, wild eyes to Nightwing, every muscle tense.

“Spoiler. Easy does it, kiddo.”

“We have to move,” said the Arrow. She jerked, trying to push Nightwing behind her.

“It’s the hallucinogens,” said Red Arrow, picking himself up. The dark-haired one held on and put his mask right in front of hers.

“You’re safe,” said Nightwing. He repeated it, “You’re safe. I’m going to carry you. You’re safe.”

Three tears leaked out onto her cheeks. One. Two-three. And she nodded, letting herself be picked up. She tucked her head into his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut and holding his shoulders.

“Okay,” said Nightwing. “Let’s move.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clearly I'm not very good at keeping ya'll in suspense! Please let me know what you think.


	14. Sick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the newest. Let me know what you think!

Spoiler slept off the remaining drugs laid out on the metal table in the center of the Foundry, hood up and cape wrapped around her, as in effigy. The others moved in the dingy shadows and Nightwing paced a lazy circuit.

Digg stood beside Oliver. “You did the right thing,” he said.

The Arrow nodded, his lips pursed and his jaw tight so that no one would believe that he actually agreed.

“You did. You rescued the girl. We’ll find The Scarecrow.”

He puffed a breath out. Roy approached them. The Arrow lay a hand on his shoulder, but walked past him and busied himself refilling his quiver.

The young woman called Nightwing with a whisper. He stepped into her vision.

“Yeah, kiddo.”

“Starling sucks.”

The elder grinned, laying a hand on the crown of her head. “Come on, it hasn’t been all bad.”

“Sucks,” she repeated.

Nightwing leaned closer.

“Why’d they keep you?” he asked.

She swallowed.

“They found a batarang. They wanted the family.”

“Locations?”

“Identities.”

His nod stretched and he shifted, running his other hand down her arm.

“It’s okay,” he assured her.

“I didn’t give anyone up,” she said.

“I know you didn’t.”

“Except the demon.”

They both grinned, equal in amusement if unequal in weariness and Felicity could believe, then, that they were family.

“What about your identity?”

“They took blood, but there’s nothing to compare it to. And their sample got smashed.”

“Attagirl.”

Spoiler’s head lolled to one side and her eyes focused on the other blonde.

“How’s my blood look to you?”

Every pair of eyes were on her, but Felicity blinked.

“How’d you even—”

Spoiler flexed her fist, cracking the same wrist where her blood had been drawn and on which a sensor still clamped around one finger.

“I wasn’t that out of it,” she said.

“Right. Of course. Because unconscious clearly isn’t unconscious. Anymore.” Felicity sat and spun her chair to her computers. “Toxin levels are manageable. White blood count is elevated and your heart rate is a bit low.”

“Normal for me,” said Spoiler and closed her eyes again. She took several shallow breathes, struggling to deepen them. “Can we go home now?” she breathed.

Nightwing touched her hood once more.

“Sure thing, kiddo. I’ll even drive.”

She groaned.

“I’ll be sick,” she warned him. Then, “I need to take my bike back. Did you find it?”

“I parked beside it,” he said. “And, don’t worry. I already put your bike in the trunk.”

Team Arrow watched her slowly open her eyes again.

“He let you bring _the car_?”

Nightwing’s smirk slipped into goofiness that she matched.

“‘Let’ probably isn’t the best term for it,” he said.

She lay her head back, so many teeth still showing.

“Oh, please take me with you to return it.”

“I wasn’t really planning to return it,” he confided, resting his forearms on the table. Felicity and Roy grinned at each other over his back. “I _was_ thinking about parking it on empty and lighting out before anyone realizes I’m there.”

“Even better.”

He unclipped the sensor on her finger and gathered her up. She slid against him, a sigh pushing past her lips, and her eyes shut.


	15. Offering

Team Arrow saw them again two weeks later.

A firefight outside a bank drew the Arrow and his protégé, but a pair of masked vigilantes were already ducking in and out of the shadows, one of them in a cape, the other with escrima sticks.

When it was over they appeared on a rooftop exactly one mile away.

“Thanks for coming up,” said Spoiler when the Arrows mounted the top of the fire escape. “We prefer the height.”

She tossed the tracker that Red Arrow had planted on her cape back to him. Blushing faintly, he tucked it into a row of others in a case on his belt.

“That’s quite the arsenal,” she said.

“You look better,” he answered.

Grinning and lifting one shoulder she said, “Well, a girl tries.”

“To say thank you,” Nightwing held up the bag full of ice cream cartons and plastic forks. 

“Why are you here?” the older Arrow growled.

 _Oliver. Be nice._ Felicity warned him.

“We’ve got intel on The Scarecrow,” said Nightwing.

“And ice cream,” Spoiler nearly sang. “We brought it from the best shop in the country, which happens to be in Bludhaven.”

Roy read the side of the bag and grinned.

“I’ve been there,” he said. The Arrow remained stoic. Red struggled to school his expression.

Spoiler, exchanging a glance with Nightwing, tossed a flashdrive to the Arrow.

“We think the Scarecrow’s starting up the Count’s old operation,” she said. “But there’s something new in the drugs.” 

A few residual sirens bleared in the distance but on top of that roof nothing and no one moved.

“New how?” the Arrow finally asked.

“Once the hallucinogen wore off,” said Nightwing, “Spoiler lost a sense of her own will. She was highly suggestive. I could command her to do things she wouldn’t normally do. Anyone could.”

“What sorts of things?”

“Go running in the rain without shoes,” she said. “Eat a stick of butter straight. Punch my boyfriend.”

Roy’s eyes widened and he looked between her and his mentor, alarmed.

“He was prepared for it,” Nightwing said to soothe him. “And she was safe. No one took advantage of her,” he tested the words and settled on “symptom.”

“I knew what I was doing, distantly, but I didn’t care,” said Spoiler, “It never occurred to me to refuse. Nothing surprised or fazed me. In higher concentrations I think it could create an instant soldier. Out of anyone.”

The Arrow stilled. Digg, who to this point had only listened, cursed into the comm.

“Felicity found a number of chemicals that could lend itself to those effects,” gruffed the Arrow. “She thought the compound combination had nullified them.”

“Latent, not null,” Spoiler corrected.

“How long did the effects last?” the younger Arrow asked.

“46 hours,” the woman answered.

Nightwing palmed a carton and passed the bag to Red. 

“Felicity,” he nearly shouted. “You and Digg be sure they save you some ice cream.”

Smirking, Spoiler nodded to them.

“It’s been a pleasure,” she said. “We’ll be in touch.”

She and Nightwing walked to the edge of the building. In unison, they raised their right arms and fired grappling guns, leaping into the air. The Arrows rushed forward, watching the ropes take each vigilante's weight. They glided to easy gaits deep in an alley across the street. A moment later, two taillights lit like eyes, but one moved before the other, narrowing like a wink.


	16. Hack

When Felicity hacked the security footage from the ice cream shop in Bludhaven, she gagged on her mocha. She watched the two fully-suited vigilantes walk in, Nightwing carrying a blue cooler on one shoulder. The staff greeted them enthusiastically, laughing, taking selfies with the vigilantes and, as Felicity discovered, using a Nightwing hashtag.

The vigilantes talked in front of the display, asking for samples, then used cash to buy five cartons of ice cream, which they set inside the gently-steaming cooler. Felicity pulled as many business feeds as she could, but lost track of them two blocks from the shop.

Felicity’s fingers flashed over the keyboard, fighting for a way into the Bludhaven traffic cameras, which were far too well-protected for standard city employees to be managing. She pushed harder and harder at the code, blitzing it, then slipping at it sideways, until her screen froze and a voice burst from her speakers.

_You have attempted to breach the network. Identify yourself or your computer will be wiped._

“Please don’t fry my computer,” she rushed out, nearly shouting. “I’m Felicity.”

 _What do you want, Felicity?_ It was a woman’s voice. Covered in layers of static and distortion programs, but it was definitely a woman’s voice.

“You know who I am?” she asked. “Oh, right. I just told you who I am. It’s me who doesn’t know who you are. Not that I should! I just…”

She broke off.

_I am Oracle._

“Holy…”

Felicity’s mouth fell open. She stared. She spun around, looking for someone, anyone to share this with, to confirm that it was actually happening, but The Quiver was empty. After their run-in with the Bludhaven vigilantes, Oliver and Roy had headed to the docks to scout out The Scarecrow’s operations. Digg had met them to take the ice cream. He should be back soon. Just not yet.

Felicity looked back at the screen.

“You’re a legend,” she breathed. “You are _such_ a legend. I mean, we told stories about you at MIT. Sometimes we’d start hacking, trying to figure out if you’re an Alum or a fifteen year old or what. We didn’t get far. I mean, you’re too good. You could be the president and we’d never know. But, the president definitely doesn’t have the time to do what you do. I mean, nobody should; you’re amazing.”

_Felicity._

“Right,” she squeezed her eyes shut. “Sorry. Babbling. I’ll stop in, in 3…2…1. I work in Starling City.”

A long pause. She tried to imagine the Oracle sitting at a screen like her own. Well, maybe a slightly shinier screen with a solid state drive for booting and more RAM, though her own computer was perfectly great and, strictly speaking, more than they could—well, Oliver could—afford at the moment.

_Is anything wrong?_

Felicity sat back in her chair. Wrong? Like, Oliver wrong? Personally wrong? Team Arrow wrong? Would Oracle be willing to help if something was?

“No. No, I was just checking up on a couple of people. Friends. I think.”

_You were trying to track Nightwing and Spoiler._

“Were you watching me?” Felicity asked. “I—I didn’t even know you were there.”

Felicity could almost hear the voice smiling, _I’m Oracle. The vigilantes of Bludhaven and Gotham are under my care._

“Oh,” Felicity mumbled. “That’s encouraging, I guess.”

_I’ve heard of you, Felicity. You and the Arrow’s team do impressive work. But stay out of the network._

The connection cut out and her computer shut down.

Cursing, Felicity restarted, hands shaking, muttering, “No no no no no no.”

But everything seemed to be fine. No wipe. Not even her desktop image had been changed.

Felicity leaned back in her chair.

“Woah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think.


	17. Office

Felicity Smoak pulled the bud from her right ear and tucked it into the single shallow drawer in her desk. She breathed and rose as Oliver Queen entered.

“You’re on time,” she greeted him. “You’re even three minutes early.”

He smiled and walked to her without sparing a glance for Palmer, seated and fresh-looking behind the glass.

“Good morning, Felicity,” he grinned, serene and patient. “How was the ice cream?” he breathed, bending toward her.

She grinned back. “We need to stay on good terms with them.”

“I think we earned a few brownie points.”

“Let’s hope so.” 

He nodded. 

“How’s Palmer today?” Oliver asked.

Felicity huffed and glanced through the glass. As if sensing her, the CEO lifting his head and met her gaze. He smiled, bringing a warm, open grin of her own.

Frowning, Oliver studied her face, his brain churning to understand. Her eyes stuttered back to his.

“He’s barely said a word to me all day,” she answered.

“Did you two argue?”

“What would we argue about?” she shot back. Blinking, she added, “Okay. Quite a few things, but very few that he knows about.”

Oliver nodded. 

“I don't trust him,” he said gently, offering her his sympathy, reminding her that they are on the same side, always.

“Of course you don’t,” Felicity hissed. “He’s running the company that’s literally got your name on it. And,” she paused, setting her jaw askew, “not doing half-bad.”

Oliver turned an annoyed expression against her and she glared. He met the glare and held.

Felicity rolled her eyes, one shoulder raised, annoyed with herself.

“Sorry,” she said. “I mean that I don’t trust him either.”

Palmer stood, shifting files aside, buttoning his suit coat, and gesturing that she should send his appointment in. She met her friend’s eyes again. “He’s ready for you. Good luck.”

Oliver quirked a brow at her and let himself through the glass door.


	18. Scheduled

“Mr. Queen,” Ray and his smile rose, greeting his guest with a handshake.

“Please, call me Oliver. Thank you for meeting with me.”

Palmer waved the words away.

“Only if you call me Ray. May I interest you in a drink?” he indicated the dark amber liquid in a crystal decanter. 

After a slightest hesitation, Oliver said, “Maybe a small one.”

Palmer indicated a silver armchair and Oliver sat, taking his glass of scotch as Palmer sat in the adjacent chair.

“How are things?” Palmer asked.

“Well. Really well,” Oliver answered, leaning back, arms propped on the rests.

“I hear that investments are up and interest against you is down.”

Oliver cocked his head. 

“And how would you know?” he asked.

Palmer shrugged. “We’re in the same game,” he said. “Trends for QC are probably true for your company, too.”

Mr. Queen considered, nodding.

“I’m actually here to talk to you about a shared investor.”

“Felicity told me as much. Wayne Enterprises. How can I help you?”

Oliver took sip. The light danced in his glass and the shallow taste grew through him.

“Investment with Wayne Enterprises makes good business sense, a conclusion we have both reached. But before I invest with them further, I want to know more about them. So, Ray, what are your impressions of them?”

Ray Palmer blinked. He drank.

“This wasn’t what I was expecting,” he said. “Maybe I could be more helpful if you tell me why you’re asking.”

“I think we both know that my instincts about people are not always the sturdiest. For example, I was completely right in trusting and promoting Felicity Smoak. I was not so wise with Isabel Rochev.

“I realize that you may not want to tell me,” Mr. Queen continued. “Particularly considering our history, or, rather, my history with this office and this company. But, right now, I am interested in protecting what I have. It’s a small company. And I’m not interested in big risks anymore.”

Palmer nodded.

“Then why trust my judgment?”

“Investments are up. Earnings are high. The board is pleased. And Felicity speaks highly of you.”

Palmer smiled to himself, drinking again to hide the breadth of his grin.

“I can’t find fault with them,” he said, finally. “The business is impeccably run and compatible with QC in many of its special projects and department structures. I almost wish I could find fault. Their books almost seem too perfect, the company too efficient. Sometimes, when someone seems too good, it’s because they are hiding something.”

“Have you had any interaction with Mr. Wayne himself?” asked Oliver.

“No,” Palmer shook his head once. Twice. “Just his sons and employees.”

“Sons?” asked Oliver. “I’ve only met Dick.”

“There’s another, even younger if you can believe it. He looks like a high schooler but he says he’s in business school. He’s smart and he surprisingly capable. I’m actually scheduled to meet with him next. Why don’t you have another drink? I’ll introduce you when he arrives.”

After gazing over the skyline, the view he almost missed of the city he loved, Oliver passed his glass to Palmer.


	19. Passing

A lithe young man stepped off the elevator at 11:26. He looked to be eighteen at most, in a finely tailored back suit. He had black hair like his brother but he stood several noticeable inches shorter.

He walked to the woman in the glass office. As he entered, she slid her desk drawer closed with one hand.

“Good afternoon,” he said, amicable and relaxed. “Timothy Drake of Wayne Enterprises. I have a meeting with Mr. Palmer.”

“Of course, Mr. Drake,” the blonde said, tapping her glasses back up her nose a fraction. “He hasn’t yet finished with his last meeting—”

Palmer pushed the door open, gesturing Oliver through ahead of him and Felicity died off.

“Tim,” Palmer greeted the young man. “I am sorry if I kept you waiting. Please meet Oliver Queen. Oliver, Timothy Drake.”

They grasped hands.

“Mr. Queen,” Drake shook firmly. “My brother Dick has told me about you.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet another Wayne, of sorts.”

Oliver’s eyes flickered to Felicity but Tim broke the handshake first. The latter chuckled.

“If you aren’t careful, you may end up meeting us all at one point or another,” he said.

Felicity squinted at his back but Oliver and Palmer both kept their expressions open.

Oliver grinned. “I look forward to it.”

When no one spoke, Mr. Queen said, “What brings you to Starling City, Mr. Drake?”

“Please call me Tim. And business. I have several meetings on my father’s behalf over the next few days.”

“Well, I hope you won’t only work,” said Palmer. “Starling is the sort of city that wins you over. You’ll want to have a little fun.”

“Of course,” Tim nodded. “But first, business.”

Suddenly, Oliver was an intrusion. He held himself square and still.

“Then I’ll let you get to it,” he said. “Ray, thank you.” They shook hands again. “Tim, I hope you enjoy your stay."

Oliver’s eyes locked with Felicity’s and he said her name in parting. Once he’d turned away, striding down the hall like he still owned it, Felicity found Timothy Drake watching her, bemused in a way that made her fidget long after he left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I waffled back and forth about when and how to introduce Timmy. I hope you liked my choice!
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think.


	20. Building

Lyla is sneaky.

Felicity knew she must be, knowing her background and knowing Digg, but the degree of Lyla’s cunning and willingness to manipulate hadn’t registered. If she weren’t so pleased, Felicity would probably call Lyla “conniving.” However, Felicity Smoak was currently lounging on the sectional, using chopsticks to eat crab cakes off a square black plate between her and Lyla. John and Oliver were laughing in the second bedroom, assembling the crib and baby-changing station. So, Felicity felt reticent to use any words with negative connotations.

Felicity’d stopped by her apartment after work to change into jeans and a sweater. She’d really wanted to be wearing sweats and a tanktop, eating more Bludhaven ice cream and working through the backlog on her DVR. Instead, she’d tied her trenchcoat closed and walked through the peppering rain, trying to psych herself up. She’d listened to her best car-chase-punk-rock playlist all afternoon in the near-empty office. Once Tim Drake left, Palmer gathered some papers and disappeared for off-site meetings.

A wooden bar dropped to the floor and Digg laughed. 

Set by a now substantially pregnant Lyla to the task of assembly, John and Oliver had bickered and snapped at each other for an hour before the project stopped and the yelling began. At their explosion, Lyla had taken the crab cakes from the oven, slipped them onto the plate with a spatula, and led Felicity to the sofa, perfectly at ease but obviously listening.

“Things have been tense lately,” Felicity had said, shoulders high around her ears.

“Why do you think I asked _them_ to assemble the furniture?” Lyla had asked, tapping her lips with a thick cloth napkin. “You and I would have finished ten minutes ago.”

Felicity’s eyes had drifted down the hallway and through the open door. Plastic wrapping and cardboard lay on the floor by the window.

The yelling had turned to murmurs.

Twenty minutes later, Diggle and Oliver were laughing together. Felicity and Lyla were eating and relaxing. Life felt good.

“Are you still enjoying the SCPD?” Felicity asked. Lyla nodded.

“They’ve asked me to continue at home after the baby’s born, until I decide to come back to the office.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah. I’m working cold cases. No leg work, just what the data can tell me. Then I compile reports and farm them out to a few officers.”

“Any solved yet?” Felicity asked, concentrating on the last cake, clamped between her chopsticks.

“Not yet. They moved me onto cold cases last week.”

Felicity nodded, taking a bite. She laid the remains back on the plate.

“Anything interesting come up so far?” she asked when her mouth was mostly empty.

Lyla laughed.

“Every one. You’d probably like it. It isn’t too different from your night job.”

The blonde shrugged, thinking of the Bludhaven traffic cameras and, naturally, of Oracle. “I doubt I’d like going through channels instead of hacking.”

A clatter and thunk sounded from the bedroom. Felicity closed her eyes and listened to Diggle’s rich, low laugh.

“You know, for someone who relies on his superior reflexes to keep him from getting shot every night,” John said, “you drop things a lot.”

Oliver chuckled. 

“My reflexes don’t save me,” he said. “My team does.”

Lyla snorted. 

Felicity smiled, too. Picking up the last of her crab cake, she shoved it in her mouth.


	21. Warning

“Felicity.”

The blonde spun on the sidewalk, gasping at the voice before she saw anything. Spoiler emerged from the shadow of a tree and Felicity stepped back, pressing herself against the streetlight. Spoiler lowered her hood and opened her hands to placate her.

“What are you doing here?” Felicity asked, hand on her bag strap like a lifeline. It kind of was. It’d be the first thing she’d use as a weapon. She’d get one or two good hits in, drop it, and run. That’s what Digg and Sara had trained her to do, anyway.

Not that she really thought she’d be hitting Spoiler.

“I had some personal business in Starling. I stayed to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“You worked for Oliver Queen, didn’t you?”

Felicity’s mouth parted and she looked right, down the street, past her mini, then left, up toward her apartment. No one was around. But it was a quiet, residential part of town, the type with nosy neighbors.

Quietly, Spoiler continued, “Find a way to tell him that he needs to be worried about his sister.”

Felicity started.

“Why? What’s wrong with Thea?”

“I don’t know. The chatter’s indistinct but it’s consistent. Something dark is happening to Thea Queen.”

When she didn’t answer, Spoiler nodded.

“How are you doing?” the vigilante asked.

“I’m fine,” Felicity said. “I have somewhere I need to be, actually.”

If pajamas and on the phone with Oliver was a “somewhere.” Because he was absolutely going to be her first order of business the moment she got inside.

“Right. Of course. I want to get home too. Date night.” The ends of Spoiler’s hair wound little curls at her shoulders and she grinned gently. “Would you like me to stay nearby until you get where you’re going?”

Felicity shook her head. “No, thanks. It’s not far.”

“Okay,” she agreed, pulling her hood over her head again. “See you.” She grinned and started back into the shadows.

“What’s it like?” Felicity called out.

Spoiler faced Felicity, who clutched the strap with white hands. The younger leaned her head to the side, studying the woman in glasses.

“What?” Spoiler asked.

“Dating. And having this big of a secret?” Felicity’s voice quivered and her eyes, she knew, were wide pools full of ripples made by something moving far below.

Spoiler smirked, her lips pressed. She was wearing dark crimson lipstick and blush. “He’s a vigilante, too.”

“Oh,” Felicity blinked as a pair of caped silhouettes soared across her mind. A car turned onto their street. Spoiler disappeared.

The Honda passed and Felicity pulled her trenchcoat tighter around her collar. The vigilante reemerged, leaping down onto the pavement without even rustling the limbs of the elm. Felicity blinked above them, looking for a break or a handhold in the thick foliage. 

“Try to get him to worry,” Spoiler said again. “Not just to check in on her, but to worry. I think she needs someone to do it and no one worries like a big brother.”

Tapping her hand to the hem of her hood, the Spoiler retreated down the dark street and moved into a lane. A moment later her motorcycle growled but the vigilante rode slowly out of the area. When Felicity could no longer hear her, she pushed her key into the lock and went inside.


	22. Visit

Nightwing leaned back and let one leg drop over the cement ledge he’d perched himself on. 

“Oracle, would you put me through to Spoiler?” he spoke into his comms.

_Say please._

“Pretty please,” he cocked his head with the binoculars, peering across his downtown.

He heard a faint click, then, _Spoiler speaking. Who calls?_

“It’s me. What’re you up to?”

Spoiler yawned.

_Tailing Huntress with Red Robin._

“Think she’ll kill anyone if you take the rest of the night off?”

_Can’t be sure. Why?_

“The Arrow just showed up in Bludhaven.”

His sister cursed.

“Exactly,” he said.

_He cannot come to Gotham._

“Well, he’s looking for you.”

_How do you know?_

“You sent him a warning about his sister.”

He heard a rustle and a light smack as she kissed Red Robin’s cheek. He was going to imagine cheek.

Steph stepped on the pedal of her cycle, revving it to life, and she pealed out onto the street.

_This is not what I’d call ‘taking the night off,’ Nightwing. Or a good end to my date night. Be there in thirty._

He disconnected the feed and swung, following the Arrow and his bike.

Ten minutes and a dozen blocks later, the Arrow picked a flat-topped apartment block at the intersection of three major roads. Once settled into a crouch on the southeast side of the building, he took out a small pair of binoculars and peered far down each road.

“You’re quiet. For once,” the Arrow said. Nightwing leaped onto the rooftop beside him.

“Wasn’t expecting company.”

The Arrow faced him, bow in hand.

“What do you know about Thea Queen?” he demanded, utilizing is full, gravelly, Arrow persona.

“I don’t,” Nightwing answered, light but sincere.

“Spoiler told Felicity that Oliver Queen needs to worry about her. Why?”

Nightwing shrugged. “Can’t say.”

“You know something and I want answers,” Arrow growled.

Nightwing watched him, then raised his hands.

“Sorry. Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I work Bludhaven. Spoiler doesn’t.”

“You said you’re on the same team.”

“I said we’re family. It’s kind of a big family. Half of us are annoyed at the other half most of the time. One of two of us pretty much hate everyone else. At least one of us is always pissed at our leader. We can’t all keep the same beats or we’d end up warring. We’re independent. I’m her brother but I’m not her keeper.”

Arrow didn’t respond, just looked over Nightwing’s city, much of it rough like the Glades, and the wind fluttered against the edge of his hood, pulled low.

“She’s coming,” Nightwing offered.

“When?” the Arrow demanded.

“As fast as her cycle’ll take her?” Nightwing said, quirking one shoulder up. “She was too far away to swing.”

The Starling City vigilante brooded, his mouth a hard line. Nightwing must have spotted him first after all.

“So, how’s the kid doing?” Nightwing asked. When the Arrow didn’t answer, Nightwing said, “And Felicity? She’s good too?” Nothing. “Good to hear. And Digg’s fine? Splendid, splendid.”

He plopped down on the ledge and lay back, arms folded beneath his head.


	23. Chat

“What do you know about Ray Palmer?” asked the Arrow.

Nightwing shrugged from the ledge where he lay. Stars peeked through the orange of Bludhaven’s nightly glow.

“As far as my family's concerned, he's just a regular-old-mortal running a Fortune 500 company. Why?”

“Felicity's been talking about him.”

“Uh huh,” Nightwing smirked. “I see why you're worried.”

The Arrow glared.

“Something's off about him. He's taking Applied Sciences projects off the books and even Felicity can't hack her way in.”

Nightwing picked his head up.

“That’s unexpected. I'll ask our Felicity to look into it.”

“Oracle,” said Arrow.

“The one and only. Big Sister in the sky.”

_You called?_

“We were just talking about you,” Nightwing said into his comms, exaggerating touching his ear for the Arrow’s sake. All cheer, the dark-haired vigilante asked, “Have you been listening?”

_Passively._

“What've you got on Ray Palmer? Should our green friend be nervous?”

_Tell him I'll forward what I've got to Felicity._

Nightwing smirked.

“My girl's gonna talk to your girl,” he said.

A loud whistling pierced his comm link and Nightwing cursed, throwing the bud out of his ear. He caught in the air and held it near his lips.

“I don't mean my _girl_ ,” he said. “I mean my girl. Not _my_ girl but my girl.”

He lifted the bud close to his ear but there was silence.

Nightwing cursed again and faced Arrow.

“The things I do for you,” he said and stretched out, disgruntled.

Eventually the Arrow sat down as well, several yards away.

“What do you care about Thea Queen?” Nightwing asked.

Nightwing didn’t expect the Arrow to answer. When he did, he said, “The Queens are under my protection. For Felicity’s sake. I lost track of Thea Queen when she left Starling.”

Nightwing nodded. Then, “She needs a better secret identity than Oliver Queen’s former assistant.” The Arrow snapped his head up at him. “She can’t keep telling strange masked men or disembodied computer voices that her name’s ‘Felicity.’”


	24. Arrival

Spoiler landed twenty feet from them.

“I know what you want,” she said, voice just loud enough to carry to the hooded one across the rooftop, “but I don’t have details.”

The Arrow rose.

“Tell me what you’ve heard.”

“‘Thea Queen is in the black.’ ‘Thea Queen is darkness now.’ ‘Thea Queen should’ve died in Starling City.’”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, Arrow,” she said it like it was his name, as normally as Laurel might have called him “Ollie.”

Two police sirens entered their range of hearing, wailing like children crying. Nightwing sat up and looked around, then lay back again.

“Who’s doing the talking?” Arrow asked.

“Criminals. It’s just chatter, stuff on open frequencies. We’ve tried tracing it but no one even seems to have heard an actual rumor.”

A long pause in which the dark-haired man dangled his legs, kicking them back and forth and staring at the sky.

“Nightwing,” Spoiler greeted her brother. He tossed up a hand in return.

“Nice ride?” he asked.

“Not bad. Stopped a robbery on Park.”

“Ah,” he listened to the sirens. “Jewelry or electronics?”

“Pets.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup. Three kids who wanted to earn some cred.”

“With puppies?”

“They were wheeling those giant bags of pet food out in buggies.”

Nightwing sat up.

“What kind?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Wasn’t Killer Croc’s goons was it?”

She snickered.

“Trust me,” she said. “It was just a trio of teens with a dumb idea.”

Their visitor cut in, speaking to Spoiler. “If you hear anything more, contact me. I’ll come directly to you next time.”

She settled into stone. 

“Stay out of Gotham,” she said.

The Arrow lifted his chin, absolutely still.

“She’s right,” Nightwing stood. “Come to Bludhaven and I’ll find you, but don’t go to Gotham.”

“Why not?”

“There are too many vigilantes and they don’t know you,” said Nightwing.

“Gotham breeds criminals and villains and despair,” said Spoiler. “Enough to support a larger-than-average population of vigilantes.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“No, but the bad guys and the free agents and the good guys all look alike,” she explained. “You might fight someone we like. Most of our family wouldn’t try to kill you, but they’d fight you and maybe just beat you up and dump you outside the city. You wouldn’t have anyone on your side.”

The Arrow frowned at them, unsure whether or not to be offended.

“Plus, I’m sick of trailing the Huntress,” Spoiler said, “which I will definitely have to continue doing if she spots you and flips again.”

The Arrow was not their leader, of course, and he didn’t have a cape or belt or holster to interrupt his silhouette against the orange sheen from Bludhaven’s downtown, but he was still magnificent-looking against it all.

He turned back toward them.

“I can protect her,” he said, then leapt, tucking sideways.

The siblings met at the edge in time to see his tail light blink open and roll onto the street and out of their sight.

 _I think you two have been a bad influence on him_ , said Oracle.

Spoiler faced her brother.

“He didn’t mean Helena. Did he?”

Frowning, Nightwing shook his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, lovely readers, I've outlined through the end of this fic. There's a good bit more to come but I think it'll go quickly from here to the end. There's still some wiggle room, though, so let me know if there's anything you'd really like to see! And, as always, I'd love to know what you think.


	25. Respect

Two weeks later, Arrow, Nightwing, Arsenal, and Spoiler returned to the Foundry, shuffling and nursing their bruises. Felicity had been running their tech and scanning heat signatures with Diggle’s help, but now she ran to hug Arsenal, who’d taken a blow on his left side, and the Arrow, who had a stab wound in his shoulder and who she held on to the longest.

“We need help,” Diggle said as the vigilantes all laid down their weapons and breathed, leaning against the metal tables. “We can’t go through another blind fight like that.”

“We weren’t blind,” said the Arrow, grimacing to remove his quiver.

“But we had no idea it was coming,” said Felicity, helping him.

“You need a sofa in here,” said Spoiler, measuring the space with her eyes. She perched on the edge of the table beside Felicity’s lone computer. “Nightwing, can we send them a sofa?”

“What, yours?”

“I only have the one. You have, like, six.”

“Three.”

“You should share.”

“You,” interrupted Arsenal, stretching his obliques gingerly, “want to have a couch delivered to the Arrow’s super secret lair?”

Spoiler laughed.

“Not that one. Just this one.”

The room chilled. Felicity and Arsenal looked to the Arrow. John steadied himself.

“You were moving out, and a month later you invited us in,” said Nightwing. He lowered his chin toward Felicity. “Where’s the centrifuge?”

She pursed her lips on one side and looked up at the Arrow.

“Our leader is the greatest detective in the world,” said the Spoiler, “but we didn’t need him to figure that out.”

The Arrow glared indistinctly around him.

“If the Scarecrow is advancing his timetable, we need support. And you two,” he indicated the visitors, “are too far away to be reliable.”

“Tell me about it,” said Spoiler. “I’ve had to fill up, like, six times in the past two weeks.”

“How about Lance?” asked Diggle.

The head of Team Arrow shook his head.

“He takes too many risks for us. Besides, the police have even less jurisdiction here than we do.”

“What about the Canary? You thought I was looking for her,” ventured Nightwing. “Is she close?”

The Arrow shook his head.

“No. She’s a friend but she isn’t here.”

“She’s with Nyssa,” Felicity quipped, turning to her screen, “heir to the demon.”

Spoiler spun, staring at Felicity. Every eye magnetized to Spoiler and hers popped up to Nightwing who watched her frenzy rise.

“Did I say something bad?” Felicity asked. No answer.

“Salmon ladder,” said Nightwing.

Spoiler strode sharply across the Foundry and leaped the last meter to seize the bar like a gymnast, pulling herself up. When the clang of the metal pole reached the fifth V, Diggle addressed Nightwing.

“You know something about Nyssa.”

The younger man rubbed the end of his escrima stick, listening to the ting of Spoiler’s exercise.

“We know the demon,” he said.

“The demon,” Felicity repeated, looking over her shoulder at the Arrow, then back. “Like, a person, ‘the Demon’?”

His mouth a grim line below his mask, the young vigilante nodded.

Spoiler reached the top of the ladder and crossed over, beginning her decent, slamming the metal bar into each groove.

“She’s going to fall,” the tech expert muttered.

“It’ll center her if she does,” Diggle answered.

Nightwing sat on the edge of the metal table.

“This Demon isn’t a good person I’m guessing,” Arsenal broached. Nightwing didn’t respond. Team Arrow exchanged weighty looks.

Forcing out a breathe, Nightwing watched Spoiler reach the mats and twirl, facing him. She maintained the wildness around her eyes, the uncertainty.

“Again,” he said and she obeyed, lifting herself and leaping with the bar, reaching for the next V to slide the ends into.

Roy leaned toward John. He breathed, “Has she been dosed?”

“No,” said Diggle.

“Hey,” Felicity said, arms crossed. “Is everyone in your family in just Bludhaven and Gotham City?”

The Arrow pursed his lips but didn’t answer or object. He could do that later. Nightwing watched his sister begin another round before answering.

“Spoiler and I’ve got a really good thing going,” he said, crossing his arms, feet wide apart. “We’re all vigilantes but we’re a family. One vigilante pulled us all together, trained us, and I was the first so I’m the eldest. I protect my family. Sometimes—very occasionally—I lead them.”

“Or some of them,” Spoiler mumbled.

Nightwing continued as if he hadn’t heard her.

“But I don’t think the family members in this direction would help.”

“What about your leader?” Felicity pressed. “If he’s been doing this a long time, he might know someone.”

“We could ask,” Spoiler allowed, hanging from the topmost V, “But our leader, our Arrow, he’s not nearly as warm and fuzzy as yours.”

Felicity didn’t know whether to balk or to laugh and she looked up at Oliver, scowling at the woman on his salmon ladder.

“You see?” Spoiler grinned. “Intimidating, I’m sure. But after _our_ Arrow, it practically looks cute.”

And as if to prove it so, she proceeded down the other side under the Arrow’s glare, never faltering, and dropped with barely a sound onto the mats.

Her brother rose and stood opposite her, an eyebrow quirked beneath his mask.

“Race you to the top.”

She lifted the bar and tossed it aside.

“You’re on.”

They each jumped at a brace, scrambling up the Vs by their fingertips and toes. Nightwing beat her and leaped onto her brace, starting down again but she was bolder and, after tapping the top, fell against the other brace, slowing herself with her feet, then dropped the rest of the way, rolling out, coming up the same time her brother sank into a crouch on the mat.

Still grinning, he reached over and batted her arm. She let herself topple over and he rose to help her up.

“So,” Spoiler asked her elder. “What do you think?”

He considered, then shrugged.

“We can ask around.”

“I don’t want anyone we don’t know looped in,” said the Arrow, hood down but still masked.

The outsiders looked at one another, understanding passing between them.

“Sure thing,” Spoiler said. “No one Team Arrow doesn’t know.”


	26. Time

Roy brought a paper sack to Felicity, who dug out a sandwich and a handful of fries, thanked him, but didn’t look away from her screens. Next he went to Spoiler, sitting cross-legged on the blue practice mat.

“Thanks, kiddo,” she accepted the bag, digging through its contents.

“How long are you going to call me that?”

She blinked up at him.

“I mean,” he shuffled one leg beside the other, then remembered that he is Arsenal and pushed all his anxiety down. “We’re probably about the same age.”

“I’m a thousand years old,” she said and nodded to her brother, handing him the bag. “Just like him.”

Roy swallowed, stepping away, and she cocked her head to one side.

“Get some more vigilante time under your belt,” she said. “You’ll see. It ages you.”

“You look young enough.”

“Looks are deceiving, young padawan.”

Roy squinted at her.

“What?” he asked.

She gawked, her chin totally lax and her mouth set to catch flies.

“Star Wars,” she said. Shaking the moment away, she moved on. “I mean that I don’t feel as young as I look. I fight crime with a utility belt full of crap and a positive outlook, but I’m still realistic. You’re new to this life. You’re young to it.”

“She’s right,” said the Arrow, taking the bag from Nightwing and offering it first to Diggle.

“I’ve been doing this since I was a kid,” said Nightwing, wiping his mouth with a napkin and refolding it in his lap. Doing so seemed to amuse him and he smirked at the paper before continuing. “Your normal persona can relate to people in a way your vigilante-self can’t. And your masked self is the one you feel like most of the time. That’s who you are underneath or you wouldn’t be a caped crusader at all.”

“Well,” said Felicity, unwrapping her burger, “minus the cape for you three.”

“How old were you?” Diggle asked.

Nightwing shrugged.

“Let’s go with a good round number like twelve.”

“Twelve?” said Felicity, her two last French fries forgotten in her hand.

“Somewhere in there.”

“What twelve year old becomes a vigilante?”

“You’d be surprised how many,” answered Spoiler.

“Did—did you?” asked Roy. Spoiler shook her head.

“Nope. I was in high school.”

“How did you survive?” Felicity asked Nightwing, awed. “Because I’ve had to play doctor on him too many times than I can count,” she pointed to the Arrow. “Digg, too. Wait. Wait, that didn’t come out right. And, it’s been loads of times. That I patched them up. Medically. Professionally. It’s not—” She shut her eyes. “It’s not that I can’t count very high. I can. I went to MIT.”

Nightwing grinned at her, chuckling, but it was the Arrow’s eyes she found to calm her. His opinion mattered so much more, and he was amused.

“We had help,” said Spoiler.

“The family?” asked the Arrow. She nodded and bit into her burger, mustard sliding onto her lip. When she chuffed it away with her hand, her brother balked.

“Young lady,” he said in a distinctly English accent, “I am shocked at you.”

Snorting, she took a napkin and stared at him with over-round eyes as she wiped the yellow from her mouth.

Nightwing’s eyes shifted and focused. Touching his ear, he stood and strode toward the far end of the room. After a moment, Spoiler could discern his voice tripping over the edges of her hearing. She couldn't understand, but the tension filling his back and shoulders were easy enough to interpret.

“Everything okay?” Roy asked. Felicity looked up from her tablet, sweeping her gaze around the room.

“Dunno, kiddo,” Spoiler breathed.

Watching Nightwing’s shoulders, she rose. When he turned, she asked him, “What?”

“Red Hood.”

She whispered a curse, eyes fixed on his eyes, surrounded by layers of black.

“Where?” she asked.

“Gotham.”

“Gotta go,” she strode for the door, taking her purple hooded cape from the over the bar of the salmon ladder.

“Spoiler, no,” Nightwing said to her back. “You stay.”

“You need backup.” She clasped the cape at her neck.

“I am backup. To _him_.”

Spoiler lowered her chin and lifted the purple cloth over her head.

“The Hood’ll try to kill him,” Spoiler insisted.

Nightwing quirked an eyebrow up at her.

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m not staying here,” she said.

“I don’t have time for this.”

“Then let’s go.”

“I think you should stay.”

“I don’t think I care.”

“Spoiler,” he lowered his voice, his authority pressing out around him, flooding her with reminders of the vigilante they’d trained under. When she didn’t talk back he said, “You can help here. We’ve got it covered in Gotham. Oracle will call you if we need you.”

Reaching into the darkness beneath her hood Nightwing cupped her neck in his hands. Then he leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

“Sorry to leave dinner early,” he addressed the silent others. “Family emergency.”

Spoiler stayed another ten minutes. Then she lay a heavy hand on Roy’s shoulder, picked up her helmet, black and sleek except for two triangles on the back of the crown like ears.

“I’m going,” she said to the Arrow. He pursed his lips, but he nodded.

The tightness around her eyes lightened.

“Thanks for dinner,” she said and climbed the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to finish posting before Season 3 premieres next month, so I'll be posting at least twice a week until the end. I know this fic is getting kind of long, but thank you so much for reading! The kudos and comments all mean so much to me.


	27. Discernment

After a quiet but cool night, Oliver sent John and Roy home. Felicity stayed at The Quiver, updating the drivers and fixing the preferences on all the computers. Routine maintenance. 

She’d spent more than a week trying to recover security footage of Thea leaving town or her in Central City, but Felicity’d had a disturbing lack of luck. Even when Nightwing and Spoiler had come several nights in a row, she hadn’t been able to focus on them. She’d been in her computer or her tablet, examining code and eating whatever her friends had put in her hands. At work, she minimized windows when she sensed someone approach her.

As Felicity hummed, watching the progress bars and typing new commands, Oliver had watched her and organized the arrows that’d arrived in that day’s shipment.

The idea that he wasn’t doing all he should to protect her plagued him. He’d never wanted her to give up her life for a duality, not when one required a mask. But Nightwing’s words on the roof returned to him again and again. Should she have a masked identity? Even if her computers serve as her mask? A codename. A mask. More layers to protect her. Would she even agree to it?

Diggle, too. Lyla and their baby are very real concerns, and although they’d worked through Oliver’s insistence that Diggle not go into the field anymore, and the abundance of masks lately had made his fieldwork unnecessary anyway, Diggle still stood beside the Arrow with only his own face and name. Slade could have done so much worse to Felicity and Digg. Another criminal might.

“Oliver Queen,” he mumbled.

His blonde friend blinked up at him.

“Felicity Smoak?” she countered. He shook his head.

“On the roof in Bludhaven. Nightwing told me that you needed a better cover than _Oliver Queen’s_ former assistant. You’re Palmer’s assistant. Why would he call you Oliver Queen’s former assistant instead of Ray Palmer’s assistant?”

She touched her glasses.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re better known than Palmer. Between the Glades and your mother and the island.”

“No,” Oliver’s face set itself into stone. “He knows who I am.” Tossing his bow into his other hand, he turned from her and picked up his quiver.

“We don’t know that,” Felicity said, standing. When he didn’t slow, she set off after him. “Oliver. Oliver, where are you going?” She grabbed his arm and spun him back toward her.

The dark look in his eyes would once have made her swallow and lean away but now she held her ground and breathed. That look wasn’t about her. She was safe with him.

“He knows who I am,” he repeated, softer. A rumble on the last word showed his emotion, his face so near to hers.

“He might not,” she countered. “Don’t go picking a fight.”

“Felicity, it’s the only way to be sure. To keep us safe.”

He strode away.

“Say you are sure,” Felicity followed. “Say he confirms it, that he knows your identity. So what?”

He breathed in and cocked his jaw to one side, ready to speak. Slamming her eyes shut, she put both hands on his chest, stopping him.

“I know,” she said quickly. “I know. Secrets are supposed to stay secrets. Present company and Team Arrow notwithstanding—”

“Stop calling it that.”

“But what are you planning to do about it?” she pressed on. “Are you going to kill Nightwing for knowing?”

“I’m going to put an arrow in him and I’m going to protect us. You. Me. Diggle. Roy. And… and Thea.”

Quiet reigned as they stared at one another.

“Is this about Thea?” she asked.

“Everyone connected to Oliver Queen made be in danger. Even Thea. Wherever she is.”

She took his hand.

“Thea is going to be okay,” she said. “We’ll find her.”

He squeezed her hand and took a step away.

“Take Roy,” she said to his back. “At least take him as back up. You’re going into Nightwing’s living room.”

The Arrow came back to her, staring down at her dear expression lined with layers of concern.

“You are my backup,” he said. Then he kissed her, so gently, on the forehead.


	28. Ranks

They’d had a fight and Dick wasn’t wearing his earpiece. She’d flay him alive, assuming he survived the night. Precedence suggested he would. The Arrow doesn’t kill. Not anymore.

Oracle took her glasses off and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Pushing the bangs of her red hair off her forehead, she put her headset back on and plucked at a control panel.

“Spoiler.”

_It’s what I do. What’s up, big sis?_ Stephanie answered.

“You need to get to Bludhaven. Where are you?”

_I’m in the Narrows. What’s wrong?_

“Arrow’s coming for Nightwing. And maybe you.”

The bang of a grappling gun, the scream of the rope.

Spoiler’s cycle revved to life and already Oracle could breathe a little more deeply. She cued a bridge camera and watched for her budding protégé. The cameras in the Narrows were notoriously sparse and heaven knows Oracle can’t utilize tech that doesn’t exist.

_Why?_

Stephanie sounded incredulous and suddenly quite young.

“I don't know. But he’s driving angry, way faster than last time. And thanks to Wayne Enterprises he has plenty of money for arrows.”

Stephanie cursed quietly.

_Tell Nightwing I’m on my way._

“I can’t. He’s not wearing his comms.”

_Son of a bat_ , Spoiler cursed, vehement. _Why not?_

Oracle didn’t answer. 

“Are you taking Ninth?” Oracle asked.

_About to._

“I’ll give you all green lights.”

_It’d be nice not to break that particular law tonight,_ Stephanie owned. _Try Alfred. He might can get to him._

“If Nightwing had any comms on him, I’d have hacked it by now,” Oracle shot back. She regretted it.

She forced her wrists to still as her fingers flew over the keys. When she’d finished and backed out of that grid, she reached a hand up to the seafoam green projection, plucked a code, and proceeded to rewrite it.

_Just try him_ , Stephanie insisted.

Oracle watched her soar over the bridge and take a hard turn onto Ninth. The glowing emeralds of a necklace lay out before her and she gunned the path beneath them.

Reaching across her desk, Oracle switched her headset to the direct line to the Cave.

“Alfred?”

She waited, fingers still tapping out the song of her life, of her discipline and her care for everyone in her extensive family.

“Alfred, are you there?”

_Of course, Oracle._

His very voice soothed her. So calm, and plenty of his native accent to make him feel trustworthy. It helped that he was.

“I can’t get in touch with Nightwing. Would you try to reach him?”

_I will. Is there anything in particular you wish me to convey to him?_

She considered, tapping this time on the arm of her wheelchair.

“Tell him that the Arrow’s on his way. ETA 2:15.”

_I will do all that I can._

“Thank you, Alfred,” she said. “But please, don’t tell anyone else. I just want to give him some advanced warning. The Arrow doesn’t kill.”

_Not anymore, so it would seem,_ Alfred agreed. _Very well. I hope to see you in the Cave again soon, Miss Barbara._

She grimaced, her eyes flickering between Nightwing swinging through Bludhaven’s east side, Spoiler’s entrance to the interstate, and a traffic camera in the direction of Starling City. Behind these, seven cameras caught the evening activities of other members of her family.

“Me, too,” she lied. “Thanks again.”

_You are welcome. Good evening._

She switched the headset to a neutral frequency and listened to the soft static.


	29. Offense

The Arrow led with a strong swipe of his bow out of the shadow of a water tower on top of a technology building. Nightwing took the hit on the jaw but rolled out of most of its strength.

“Hello to you, too,” he said, recovering in a crouch several feet away.

“You know my name,” said the Arrow, a shaft notched and trained at Nightwing’s chest.

Nightwing rolled his eyes.

“Just so I’m clear, are you pissed that I know or that I didn’t tell you I know? Because I had a very similar fight with my ex this morning and I don’t feel like having another one.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since before I met you. I didn’t hold it against you, though.” He pointed to the bow. “This, I might.”

“I trusted you,” the hooded one growled back. “With my plans. With my team. They are _my_ family.”

Nightwing sighed.

“Do you mind if I sit?” he said. When the Arrow didn’t move, he lowered himself onto the ledge and looked up through the fringe of his hair. “I trust you, too. You helped me rescue Spoiler. Have I done anything to betray you?”

His lightness infuriated the other, who frowned even deeper and took a step forward.

“People depend on this secret,” the Arrow growled. “It keeps them safe.”

“Hey, I know that,” Nightwing answered, both arms up, palms open and facing his opponent. “But have I attacked Roy? Have I sent anyone to kidnap Felicity? Has John gone missing?”

The Arrow’s frown continued.

Nightwing cocked his head to the side.

“Is this about your sister?”

Sucking a breath in, Arrow stepped forward again, and this time Nightwing saw fear behind his motion.

“Did something happen?” Dick asked, quietly. “Did you find out anything?”

A deep breath under the hood made his stomach expand and his shoulders rise. Nightwing charged the final two meters between them, knocking the bow aside with one of his escrima sticks and striking Oliver across the chest with the other. The Arrow took the hit but didn’t let go of his arrow.

“I don’t like pointy things,” Nightwing said, leaping for him, foot outreached for a kick.

The Arrow struck back this time and fired one arrow that pinged off of the water tower.

“Now put that down and hit me, Legolas. That’s why you came here.”

But he didn’t. The dark-haired vigilante was too close to fire at, so the Arrow stuck him in shoulder and twisted the shaft to make it stick.


	30. Negotiate

Oliver Queen flew backwards. He hit the rooftop hard and pushed himself up, but Nightwing was slouched against the water tank, arrow protruding from his shoulder.

Spoiler landed between them, her cape swishing into place around her ankles. She faced the Arrow, left hand pulled from her glove and palms extended flat toward him. She’d never looked so like Nightwing than in mimicking his gesture, trying to protect him.

“We do not want to hurt you,” she said, tone soothing and soft.

“I started it,” Nightwing owned.

“Idiot,” she said. “But I’ll deal with you later. Or, Oracle will.”

“Why should I leave you alive?” thundered the Arrow, bow retrieved and trained on her now.

Spoiler breathed and watched. 

“Because we’re friends,” she said.

When she heard Nightwing shift she twisted herself enough to meet his eyes. He met her gaze without a hint of mirth. Reading acceptance and risk, her eyes widened.

“No,” she said, alarmed. “That’s stupid. No. Just stay down.”

“Get behind me,” Nightwing instructed. She snorted, her back to him.

“You’re on the ground.”

“It’s the best way,” he said, ignoring her quip.

Spoiler shook her head. “You risk more than yourself.”

He weighed it in her eyes.

“I know,” he said again.

“What?” demanded the Arrow.

Nightwing dragged a hand over his face, pulling his mask down. The Arrow’s own eyes grew wide and he backed a step away, his bowstring released from some of its tension.

“Dick Grayson,” Oliver said. His eyes shot to Spoiler, whose eyebrow arched in utter consternation.

 _No way,_ Felicity muttered. Oliver could hear her typing rapidly.

“No point in abandoning my stupid brother now,” Spoiler said, pulling her own mask down around her neck. Oliver Queen blinked at Stephanie but, in the context of Dick Grayson, she made more sense. “So now you know. Are you still dying to shoot someone?”

The seconds congealed, turning slower and thicker as they flowed on. Whatever raced through the Arrow’s mind did not reach Stephanie or Dick.

She listened to blood bubble and squeeze out of him. She forced herself to remain still. What was he doing? He’s fought and won with way worse than a single arrow to the shoulder.

Oliver’s anger drained from him, leaving concern. He could see again and he pulled taut his bow.

“You went to my family, my friends,” he said, so low and severe that Stephanie’s mind leapt up again, racing. “What do you want with them?”

Stephanie nodded. “Yes. We knew who you were. We knew before we even went to the party.”

“Bruce Wayne sent you.”

“Yes,” said Dick. “My father did send me. But our _leader_ gave me instructions. He’s the one who sent Spoiler.”

She breathed, blinking slowly, pretending to ignore Dick clutching the arrow in his shoulder. “Our leader wanted information: who’s important to you, who’s around you, what your relationships are like. I’m better at reading those things than Nightwing is.”

“Grayson!” the vigilante shouted.

“Right, him,” she said, blaise. “Do you want to know why I agreed?”

Opening her bright blue eyes to him, Stephanie lifted her hand again, able to hold on to his agitation and swing from it, circles of empathy that she hoped would bind his hands.

“I live in Gotham. I protect the kids, stay near the schools. I look out for orphans and foster kids. When I was a kid I used to climb onto the roof at night and watch the sky for Gotham’s heroes. When I started dating Dick’s brother, Dick saw something in me he recognized. He introduced me to the leader of our family.”

 _That sounds so much like a cult_ , Felicity said into Oliver’s ear.

“But you are both Bruce Wayne’s kids.”

“That’s because Bruce found out what a horrible person my father is. And I’m only a ward. Dick’s a son. He’s been adopted.”

 _Her boyfriend’s a vigilante. She told me so_ , said Felicity. _I’ll see who she’s been dating._

Shaking himself, the Arrow growled, “What does your leader care about me?”

“He’s the greatest detective in the world,” Stephanie said. “It wasn’t hard for him to figure you out. Oliver Queen came back from the dead and a week later, there’s a vigilante in Starling City, taking out the people who funded the city’s worst evils. The Glades fell, and Oliver Queen and the Arrow weren’t seen for months.”

“Oliver Queen and the Arrow reappeared within a day of one another,” said Nightwing, “one still depressed from his friend’s death and the other suddenly unwilling to kill. Even the SCPD knows Felicity Smoak works for both you and the Arrow. You wear green. Oliver Queen was stranded on a jungle island for five years. You have tenuous links to the League of Assassins and stronger ties to ARGUS.”

Stephanie swallowed and finished quietly. “It wasn’t hard.”

Stunned, the Arrow’s hand laxed on his bow. He corrected his grip.

“Then why did he send you?” he asked.

“Your activities weren’t confined to the list anymore,” said Nightwing. “You were starting to branch outside of Starling. He needed to know if you might be a threat to him or to his family. Or, if you might be an asset.”

 _They were researching,_ Felicity said. _They were there to get what numbers and facts couldn’t._

The Arrow shifted.

“Do you want to know what we told him?” Spoiler reasserted herself, taking the vigilante’s attention back, away from her brother. “We got into the car after the party and called him. We were still in your driveway. We said you were vulnerable.”

He stepped toward her but she talked on.

“We also said that we like you, that we wanted to be Oliver Queen’s friends and the Arrow’s allies.”

“He stopped looking into you,” said Dick, holding his wound. Stephanie bit her lower lip on one side. “As a threat at least. But we had a relationship with you and your partners. When I needed your help, I didn’t hesitate to reach out.”

 _Oliver_ , Felicity said. He listened to her, to everything she’d said tonight.

He lowered his bow.

Dick pulled the arrow out of his shoulder.

“Did I help pay for this?” he asked.

Oliver lowered his hood.

“Thought so,” Dick threw it aside.

Spoiler touched her comm. “Crisis averted,” she said.

 _Good, because we have another problem_ , said Oracle.

“Glorious,” Stephanie murmured. She pulled her mask up and walked to her brother, kneeling to look at his wound. He rose with her help.

_Robin is in Bludhaven._

“What?” Stephanie started, eyes huge.

“What’s wrong?” Nightwing asked.

“Why’s he here?” Spoiler asked Oracle.

_He must have overheard me talking to Alfred._

Stephanie cursed. One short, harsh word over and over.

“What?” Nightwing demanded, lifting his mask around his eyes again.

“The demon,” she said. 

The Arrow pulled a long shaft from his quiver.

To Oracle, Stephanie said, “Can’t you call him off?”

_I’ve tried. He won’t listen._

“Of course,” she said.

Dick faced Oliver, hands up and open.

“Please don't shoot him,” Nightwing said. “He's just a kid.”


	31. Defense

“Who?” the Arrow demanded. “Who’s ‘the demon’?”

“You're new,” Spoiler interrupted, pulling up her hood and replacing her glove. “He’ll try to prove himself.”

“Who is coming?” Arrow demanded.

_Oliver, what’s going on?_ Felicity asked, voice growing higher.

He breathed, “I don’t know.”

The others ignored his aside.

“He's not a kid like Roy,” Spoiler said. “He's an actual kid. He's short and he's young. He couldn't grow facial hair if he tried.”

The Arrow released the tension on his bow.

He muttered to Felicity, “Thermal.”

A pair of dingbats went off and the three of them turned their backs to one another, forming a triangular defensive position, but the Arrow kept his bow low. 

“I'll stay and draw him into the open,” Spoiler said.

“I don't like you using yourself for bait.”

“There's no one in Bludhaven he hates more than me.”

“Only because your boyfriend's not here.”

“Do you have a better idea, boy wonder?” she spat.

“No. I'm just saying I don't like it.”

“Noted. Oracle has words for you, I think.”

“Has he even seen you in the new garb?” asked Nightwing. He held a hand up to the air.

Spoiler yanked her hood off and let her blonde hair loose to the night.

“Com’ere you little runt!” she called.

“Do you want him to try to kill you?” Nightwing mumbled.

“He's going to try anyway.”

“Who _is_ it?” the Arrow interrupted, voice straining.

Spoiler answered, “Our youngest brother.”

_I see a fourth heat signature_ , said Felicity. _East-Southeast. Incoming_.

A batarang aimed at Nightwing's head made him duck and the Starling vigilante pulled against the bowstring. From a fast swing, a boy kicked the Arrow in the chest, sending him spiraling off the building.

“Robin, no!” Nightwing shouted. They raced to the edge.

The Arrow leaped from the fire escape on the opposite building onto theirs. Nightwing squinted into the darkness, then bolted. The Arrow climbed back onto the roof, crouching low. 

“You okay?” Spoiler asked when he reached her. He nodded, swinging his leg over the ledge. “He's ten,” she said in lieu of an explanation. “He may have been raised by the League of Assassins but he's still ten.”

The Arrow froze and looked at her. “He was raised by the League?”

She didn't answer.

“Felicity,” he muttered. 

_He’s gone. There’s interference._

They moved away from the edge and backed toward the center.

“I'm gathering there's trouble in the family,” said the Arrow a moment later.

“Not really. Robin and I just don't get along. But he adores Nightwing.”

He shot her a look and they listened on, trying to hear the whizz of a batarang, the tink of a dingbat, or the grind of a grappling gun over the wind and the rolling tires of Bludhaven.

_He’s coming back around. Same line_ , said Felicity. Arrow turned.

“There!”

Spoiler threw a batarang and Nightwing leapt onto the boy as he swooped for another pass. Robin shouted and Nightwing pried his hand off the glider, sending them tumbling onto the roof. The kid was already spinning up, leaping for Spoiler, who caught him and used his momentum to kick him back off her, over her head.

“Enough!” shouted Nightwing, running between them.

Spoiler stayed in her crouch and the other kept an arrow trained on the boy. Robin stilled but remained wound tight.

“Robin, chill out,” Nightwing said. “You proved your point.”

“I don't know that he did,” said the Arrow.

Nightwing shot him a look.

“What is your point?” Arrow asked.

He didn't expect the red, green, and black-clad child, who hardly came above Nightwing’s waist, to interrupt his scowling and answer, but he did. 

“That this isn't your city,” the boy was forcing his voice into a lower register.

“He knows that,” said Spoiler. “Do you?”

“Tt,” Robin answered.

Spoiler rolled her eyes and the kid nearly hissed at her. She snapped her eyes back to him.

“Does _he_ know where you are?” she asked.

Robin didn't answer. She rolled her eyes again.

“Good plan, runt.”

“Why are you here?” Robin demanded of the Arrow. The man looked sidelong at Nightwing, who answered.

“He's helping me with a case.”

“Then why is she here?” Robin stuck his chin out at Spoiler. “She's useless.”

“Why are you so horrible?” Spoiler said.

“Why'd you start stuffing your suit?”

“I loathe you.”

The kid smirked, pleased.

“And I love you,” Spoiler added. He scowled and she grinned.

Nightwing stepped forward.

“Okay. This fight's over,” he declard.

“I still want to know why they're here,” said Robin. “Why didn't you ask me for help?” The child desperate for attention and validation broke through in his voice. Nightwing crossed to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. Robin looked up at his face and Spoiler bit her lip. She gave a bemused expression to Arrow, who only looked at her, head slightly cocked.

“Because he has information I need for Bludhaven and you have cases of your own in Gotham,” said Nightwing.

The Spoiler relaxed and stood by the Arrow. Disgusted, Robin looked to his favorite and noticed the interruption in the material of his suit. Roaring, he spun out of Nightwing’s grasp and charged the Arrow. They grappled for mere seconds before the others dragged them apart. Nightwing held the thrashing child around the middle with one arm and across his shoulders with the other.

“It’s okay,” Spoiler said, backing away from the now-isolated Arrow. “No harm. No foul.”

“Stop pandering to him,” shouted Robin, bucking out of Nightwing’s arms. “He’s just a fallen billionaire.”

Arrow’s bow tightened and both Spoiler and Nightwing moved, Nightwing toward the Arrow—just enough to draw his attention—while shoving Robin toward Spoiler. She stepped in front of the child, grabbing him by both arms to keep him hidden from the Arrow’s sight. Robin hissed and hit her but she held on.

“Stop,” she muttered. “You don’t want an arrow in you.”

Nightwing raised both hands, wide and placating.

“Arrow. He’s my little brother. She’s my little sister. I need you to stop pointing that at them.”

“He’s ten,” Spoiler breathed. The breeze carried her voice. “He doesn’t actually know anything about you. He knows about himself. He knows about his family, what our lives look like and what they cost. Financially. Emotionally. Physically. He’s guessing about you based on what he knows of Nightwing and I.”

When the Arrow didn’t relax his stance, Nightwing spoke again.

“He’s ten. He’s trying to freak you out and you’re letting him.”

_Oliver_ , Felicity asked, her voice small. _Is he really just a kid?_

It was enough.


	32. Home

Felicity was still at The Quiver, waiting for him, when Oliver got back to Starling. 

She leapt up and crossed to him.

“Are you okay?” she asked, squeezing him by the shoulders, her whole body pushed flush to his. He nodded, stepped away, and sat on the edge of his cot. Dragging his boots off, he let himself slouch.

“I’m fine,” he said. “What are you still doing here?”

Felicity bit her lip.

“I didn’t go home because I knew I’d never sleep,” she forced a light laugh. “It’s always stressful, listening to you fight and knowing there’s nothing else I can do to help you. Or to protect you.”

His expression softened and he squeezed her arm.

“I’m fine, Felicity,” he assured again. She blinked and shifted.

“I wasn’t worried about you getting hurt,” she said, rolling her eyes too dramatically. “I mean, physically, yes I was a little bit. But I didn’t want you to take anything out on your friends, or potential friends.”

“They are dangerous people, Felicity,” he returned.

“So are you.” When he didn’t calm, she elaborated. “You’re afraid for Thea.”

He straightened and she took that space for herself, sinking in front of him and laying her hands on his knees.

“You’re afraid and you want to hurt someone because you are hurting.”

He lowered his chin but she still studied him, her eyes nearly too wet and he couldn’t tell if it was because of him or the time or something else.

She did not say anything. After a few minutes, he touched her bare arms with his fingertips and she leaned nearer.

“What else did you find out about them?” he asked.

“Stephanie has been dating Wayne’s third son, Tim Drake.”

“Third?”

“Yeah. For such a playboy, he’s taken in a lot of orphans.”

“So Drake is most likely a vigilante?”

“That’s my bet.” 

Oliver squeezed his eyes shut. He reached one arm around Felicity’s shoulders and drew her closer. His shattered weariness reminded her that he’d ridden for hours, fought three vigilantes, and been sleeping poorly. It also reminded her that she had a meeting in four hours. She squeezed one of his arms and stood.

Oliver held on to her arm, looking up to her wide eyes.

“Why didn’t I see it sooner?” he asked her.

Frowning, Felicity forced herself not to shrug. Instead, she ran over what she wanted to say in her mind. Again and again it passed through.

“None of us did.” 

He closed his eyes and leaned his head against her stomach. She hesitated. His head rolled to one side and he sighed. She lay both of her hands on the back of his neck and let her fingertips prickle his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big update this time. Thank you all for reading!


	33. Good

In the morning, Palmer announced to Felicity his intentions to throw a party for their investors and friends. He encouraged her to bring a date, if she wanted. Because Oliver was already on the guest list, which meant Diggle would be there too, she invited Roy, who appeared in his one good suit at her door promptly at seven. By nine, however, Palmer had trapped Felicity within rings of investors and Roy leaned against a wall near the kitchen doors, wishing he hadn’t agreed to this.

“You’re the one.”

Roy cut his head sharply toward the voice. Stephanie Brown, in a long crimson gown that caught and dazzled in the light of the chandeliers and sconces, smiled tentatively at him. Her blonde hair hung straight down her back except for a lock clipped up near her temple. He frowned and looked away. She stood beside him and leaned back. Roy downed the rest of his champagne. He grimaced. He’d never liked the bubbling.

“You here to spy some more?” he asked, glancing through the room.

She cocked her head and studied him.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m here to see if we’re good. None of _that_ happened the way it should have.”

“Would you have told us? Ever?”

She knew what he meant. Would she have ever revealed her name? If Oliver hadn’t forced the confrontation, would they have ever told them the truth?

“Yes,” she said. “We were bringing our leader around to it. We were hoping you all might meet him.” She paused and cracked a wrist. She added, lighter, “One of these days.”

Roy took a long, deep breath. He rolled to one shoulder, facing her.

“So how does this work? You just pick whatever Wayne Enterprises rep needs to come to Starling and use him so you can spy on us?”

She pressed her lips together.

“This works however you want it to. These faces pretend, feign ignorance and vanity and sloth. Our hidden faces show our virtues. And I didn’t lie to you about Dick. I’m not lying to you about my date tonight, either. He asked me to come with him.”

“You only wanted to meet us because of our night jobs, right?”

She laid a hand on his arm.

“It’s you who know more now. React however you want to. But,” she bit her lip, “I do hope we’re good.”

He looked at her hand on his arm and she gave it a rub to let him know she wasn’t embarrassed. 

“Would you excuse us?” Both of their heads snapped to face the speaker. “I’d like to talk to my boyfriend.” She spat the final two words. She wore a long black dress with a serious slit on one side and a scowl.

Roy straightened, reaching for her, eyes enormous and round with disbelief.

“Thea?” he muttered. She softened when she looked at him, but evaded his hand and glared at the other woman.

“Thea Queen,” Stephanie deduced. She glanced at Roy as if needing confirmation. “I’m Stephanie. It’s such a pleased to meet you.”

“Get. Lost.”

Stephanie picked her weight off the wall.

“The way I heard it, you walked out on everyone in Starling,” said the blonde. “I don’t think you get to call him your boyfriend anymore. I don’t think you get to call yourself much of anything.”

The Queen glared.

“Steph,” said Roy.

“I know. I don’t get a vote,” she returned, sighing. “I’ll be with my date should you two care to join us.”

As she stepped away, Stephanie’s legs seized and she forced herself to turn back.

“It _is_ nice to meet you,” she said to Thea.

The Queen heiress watched her walk the length of the room to a dark-haired young man about her height. He drew her into the circle with one arm.

Roy watched Thea.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you back? Where have you been?”

“I’m actually not here to talk to you,” Thea cut him off. “I just didn’t like the look of her.”

“She’s a friend,” Roy said, shielding his pain from Thea but taking her face between his hands. “I love you. I never stopped. Why did you leave like that?” He leaned so close, ready to kiss her, to listen, to argue, to beg.

From his cuff he slipped a thin metal disc into her voluminous hair.

But Thea would do none of these. She shoved his hands aside and stepped once, away from him.

“You are a liar,” she said. “My whole life was full of liars. So I left. I found the truth. My real father. Who I really am.”


	34. Bad

Mr. Queen stood on the balcony, breathing in the night, sleek glass and metal behind him, the city lit before him. 

Hearing a woman’s heels he smiled, expecting to find Felicity when put his back to the city. Seeing the last member of his family, however, Oliver gasped and stepped into the railing.

“Thea,” he said. She continued forward, face tight. “Thea,” he strode the last few feet to her and seized her in a crushing hug. She tolerated it but it brought tears out of his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I did everything wrong. I’m so sorry.”

She squared her shoulders and pushed forward. Reluctantly but nearly unconsciously, he go.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Where have you been?”

“With my father,” she answered. Oliver blinked, withdrew half a step, and came forward again.

“Your father?”

“My real father.”

Again, he blinked at her.

“Thea. Malcolm Merlyn is dead.”

She shook her head, slowly, derisive in her determination.

“No. Just another lie Mom told us.”

Breathing, Oliver set both hands on his sister’s shoulders.

“I know Merlyn’s dead. He has to be. I saw the body.”

She looked away, annoyed again, and Oliver regrouped.

“Thea,” he said, “Dad knew. And he chose you. He chose _us_. You don’t have to have anything to do with Merlyn.”

Her face remained as if etched.

“Do you remember,” Oliver tried again, “when Mom announced her candidacy? I introduced her. I was fine, then when I got up the platform I could barely speak? Do you remember?”

Thea pursed her lips, gazing across the city. She blinked twice, fast, and nodded.

“I'd just learned, Thea,” he said. His whole body and all his energy poured into conveying the truth and his love to her. “I should have told you that day. But it hadn’t been years that I knew. It’d been months. I moved out after that. Remember? I was so disgusted with Mom. And I should have told you to truth when you asked. Mom lied. I lied. But Slade lied to you, too. And I am so, so sorry. Thea. Please forgive me.”

She was crying, but the face she turned back to him held no sympathy.

“I’ll see you around, Ollie,” she said and left him. When he objected, called her name, followed her into Palmer’s penthouse, the lights cut out. Still, he pursued his sister through the shouting, undulating crowd.

Three loud bangs startled him into looked away. Seeing the various Wayne progeny converging upon the area, though, he sought his sister again. Her small nose with it's little turn up at the end. Her careful, strong jaw. Her honey-colored hair. Her wiry shoulders.

Thea was gone.


	35. Worse

Roy reached Oliver, dazed, forelorn, near the center of the room. 

Tim Drake showed the people around him the fireworker some joker had set off. He and Stephanie Brown laughed, easing everyone into smiles around them.

“Thea—” Roy began. His mentor nodded. 

“I know.”

“We’ve got to suit up,” he said. “I slipped a tracker on her.”

Oliver blinked twice, processing, then started the young man toward the door.

“Get Diggle. I’ll meet you at the car.”

Oliver strode toward Felicity. Clasping both hands, he whispered in her ear. She nodded. He ran one hand down her arm and left.

Felicity watched him go. Even after he’d disappeared down the elevator bay she did not look away.

“He seemed to be in a hurry,” Ray Palmer commented. She looked, blank-faced, up into his sweet expression before the meaning struck her.

“Oh. Yes. Emergency. He’d—” she stumbled. “He was just apologizing. He’d promised to dance the next one with me. But, you know. Duty calls. No big loss.”

Patting her thighs with flat palms, she glanced around. Stephanie had been ushered to the piano, Tim in tow. Her blue eyes linked with Felicity's across the room.

“Well, that won’t do,” Palmer said, extending his hand to his assistant.

“Are—” her attention shot back to him. “Are you asking me, Mr. Palmer?”

“I am. Felicity Smoak,” he clicked his heels together before her, “would you do me the honor of a dance?”

She honestly wasn’t sure what she wanted. But she couldn’t look away. His blue eyes and easy smile had rooted her.

The band faded themselves out and, as Stephanie began to press out her melody, wove themselves into her piece.

This was her role, her secret identity. And this was Felicity's. She looked back up at her boss. His eyes kept warmly in hers, not glancing away, not listening to someone else, not leaving. So she decided.

Gingerly, wondering if she should have already pled a migraine and run after her team, she laid her hand in his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun dun! 
> 
> I re-organized and I'm pretty sure the "15 more chapters" doesn't hold anymore, but I am aiming for 50 chapters total. 
> 
> Thank you all so, so much for sticking with me and with the story!


	36. Track

Arsenal and Arrow found the tracker in Roy’s house, laying on the bedside table.

The deflated men entered the Foundry, their masks in their hands, and Diggle rose from the new pair of computers.

“Do you think she knows I’m Arsenal?” asked Roy.

“She found the bow and arrows before she left, so she knows you’re working with the Arrow,” his mentor answered. “There aren’t a lot of options that don’t point to Arsenal.”

Roy paused only a moment.

“Does that put you in danger?” he asked.

Oliver looked sharply back at him. Watching the wide brown eyes of the young man, the elder softened, settling one hand on his shoulder so that they stopped and faced one another.

“Merlyn already knows who I am,” Oliver said.

Above them, footsteps sounded through the empty club and Nightwing appeared, Felicity’s hand tucked into his arm. He held the security door open, then descended the stairs beside her.

“Look who I found on the dance floor,” he said.

Oliver looked away, zipping open his suit and pulling it off.

“Grayson,” Diggle muttered in greeting. Roy leapt onto a tabletop, thoroughly miserable. Unlatching herself from her escort, Felicity crossed to John.

“You didn’t find her?” she murmured, frowning.

John shook his head.

“What are you doing here, Dick?” Oliver said, his back to the man in his well-tailored suit.

“Steph called me,” he said. “She couldn’t leave the party but I’m here to offer our help, if you need it.”

At Queen’s expression Dick added, “Or want it.”

Felicity glanced between the men and faced Dick.

“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll let you know.”

He opened his mouth to say more but, thinking better of it, merely nodded to her. Stretching, he backed up several steps and turned for the door. Passing Roy, he clapped him on the arm and laid a small black rectangle beside him.

“What this?” he asked.

“A way to contact us,” he answered. Spinning and continuing backwards toward the stairs Nightwing said, “I’m going to hang out in town tonight. Keep an eye out. That way you can work on finding your sister. Sound good?”

Oliver answered without turning around.

“Do whatever you want.”

When Dick Grayson had gone and the door had resealed, their leader, still bare-chested, faced his friends.

“Felicity, I want you to try to hack the train station security cameras again.”

“Oliver,” she protested. “We tried that when Spoiler warned us. Slade cut too many systems. The station’s security cameras don’t have anything.”

He heaved several breaths, fighting for control of his voice. 

“Thea said that she’s been with Malcolm Merlyn all this time.”

“No,” said Felicity, shaking her head hard and fast. “You shot him. You killed him. Oliver.”

“If Merlyn is alive, he must have been at the train station,” he leveled a darkly heated look at the woman across from him, earnest. “I need to see if what Thea told me is true.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but didn’t. Instead, she offered a short, vigorous bob of her head. Braced, Oliver continued.

“We three,” he addressed the men, “are going to review every piece of footage from tonight, anywhere in Starling where Thea might be or have been. Roy, see who left the tracker at your house. It might not have been Thea. Then find out where that person is now. John, work backwards. See where she might have come from before the party. I’ll look at the party itself.”

John and Felicity moved for the computers immediately, tight-lipped and serious. Queen approached the young man and spoke quietly.

“Roy, I think you should sleep at The Quiver tonight.”

The younger man lifted his head and allowed himself to be steered toward the next room to change back into street clothes. To John, he’d never looked so young.

The next evening, a long grey couch appeared on the loading dock wrapped in translucent plastic.


	37. Ask

She’d done everything she could. She did everything she could weeks before. But she tried again. And she got more creative, working at it far longer, wondering if Merlyn had been there in the code, if he’d hidden the video, erased the footage. If she’d looked three months earlier, or after Lian Yu, would she have found it?

She screwed up one side of her mouth around her pencap. She was out of her depth.

A week after the party, when she was alone in the Foundry, Felicity gave in. She blitzed Gotham’s network with a question.

"Will you help us?"

Eleven minutes later, the lights in the Foundry all went out. Her speakers blared white noise, then cut off. Felicity’s computer screen glowed blue, then green.

_Felicity._

“Oracle,” she said, trying not to sound as relieved as she felt. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

_You asked for my help._

“Yeah, but I didn’t ask you to drop the base.” Felicity shut her eyes and shook her head. “Sorry. Not important.” She explained the situation. Not the particulars of Oliver, but the word that Malcolm Merlyn was back, the Arrow’s need to discover any truth to it, and, finally, that Thea Queen might have left Starling with Merlyn the night Starling had nearly been destroyed.

_I’ll look into it,_ Oracle promised. The Foundry went dark.


	38. Answer

Mr. Queen was letting his work slip. Laurel came by to yell at him, but found him lost-looking, sitting at his desk in the office he was renting to lend their company more credibility.

“Ollie,” she took to his side. He minimized the window on his screen and sat back, giving her a tired, heart-aching smile.

“Laurel, what a surprise. Come in, please.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t say “I’m already in,” though she thought about it.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded.

Her friend pursed his lips and cocked his head, forcing innocence and confusion into his features. Only more pain leaked through. She dropped to her knees beside his chair.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She shifted, cupping his head in her hand. She asked again.

When he didn’t answer she said, “You’re going to lose another company if you keep this up. But I’m not going to let that happen because I know that something is terribly wrong. And you are going to be honest with me. And this time, we’re going to fix it.”

His hand moved in jerks at first. But, as it reached his mouse, his muscles smoothed out and the window popped back up.

“Is—” Laurel squinted at the screen, leaning over her friend’s shoulder and steadying herself on the tabletop. “Is that Thea?”

Both hands pressed in a fist to his mouth, he nodded. He pressed “Enter” and the clip played. They watched her run. They watched a man in a black and white mask pursuing her. They watched him die. When Malcolm Merlyn stepped into the frame on the platform, Oliver stopped the footage.

Laurel gasped. Pushing herself even closer, she shuttered and withdrew.

“Oh, Ollie,” she said.

“Thea was at Palmer’s party,” he said. “She confronted me. She was angry. She told me she’d been with Merlyn all this time.”

“Did he kidnap her? Did she escape?”

“No. I think she went willingly,” Oliver pressed his hands to his forehead.

“How is he alive?” she asked. “I mean. Didn’t the Arrow…” she bit her lip and looked at her friend. He nodded, blinking fast.

“Yeah. The Arrow killed him.”

“So how is he here?” Laurel pointed to the image. When it became clear that he didn’t know, she pulled him into a hug and held him there.

After she left, Oliver opened another file and moved the footage to the fourth hour, scanning ahead until he saw himself come to Felicity, take her hands, and whisper to her. Less than eight feet away, Ray Palmer watched them. She’d looked beautiful. Again. Had he told her?

His smaller, digital self had barely left the room when Palmer approached Felicity, spoke to her, and led her to the dance floor. In a fit of gluttony, Oliver watched them dance together, his jaw set, over and over.


	39. New

Dick Grayson buzzed the communicator he’d given the Arrow to no answer. He called Oliver Queen’s office twice to no answer. Then he called the executive assistant at Queen Consolidated and asked for the team’s permission to visit. After a flurry of under-the-desk texting, Felicity left the message for Mr. Grayson at Wayne Enterprises, “Tonight. The usual place. -Felicity”. She hung up before she realized how bad that sounded. 

Dick and Stephanie appeared in Verdant’s parking lot in their street clothes just after sunset with a duffle bag, a cooler full of Bludhaven ice cream, and two plastic to-go bags full of hot dumplings and soup. 

Timothy Drake was also with them, getting out of the driver’s seat of a dark red Audi.

Oliver and John met them in the growing dark.

“Don’t shoot, it’s only us,” Spoiler grinned, both hands up. “We’re in urban camouflage mode.”

At a look from Diggle, she shrugged, “That’s what the Demon calls normal clothes.” 

“Mr. Queen,” said Tim. “I’m here to offer your team my services.”

“He’s quite the little detective,” Dick said, rocking on his heels. “And, since you know him, and since he has the same night job as all of us, Stephanie and I asked him to look into your vertigo case.”

Tim grinned through his brother’s statement.

“I can provide references,” he offered.

Stephanie rolled her eyes again, without any malice.

“Of course you can,” she said. But when he looked at her, their grins magnified and stretched with their glee, until they looked every bit the college students they are.

Dick reached over and tipped his brother’s head forward.

Oliver Queen studied Tim, eyes low and severe. Shorter than Dick but with similarly dark hair, Tim met the scrutiny with an open expression. Confident, but not arrogant. John studied him as well, scrubbing his hand over his chin.

“The same night job, huh?” Digg said. “What’s with kids in Gotham?”

“We’re a special breed,” said Nightwing. “Although, Timmy and I grew up in the circus, actually.”

“The circus?” said Digg, eyes narrowing over crossed arms. “As what? Pint-sized clowns?”

Oliver knew the answer already, from Felicity. 

Dick grinned. “Trapeze. I learned to fly before I learned to read.”

“Well,” shrugged Drake, “how to fall, anyway.”

“I was born in Gotham,” said Stephanie, a bite beneath her smile. “You get tough or the city spits you out. Or kills you.”

“No matter how tough you are, sometimes, good or bad, people just die,” said Tim, looking sideways at her, conveying something earnest that neither Oliver nor Diggle could read. Then Tim faced them, “We all try to tip that balance.”

“I’m only interested in finding my sister,” Queen returned.

“You want results,” Drake summarized. He held up an exterior hard drive. “My best facial recognition program. Wherever your sister is, this will help us find her.”

“What do you say, Oliver?” said Dick. “A trio of career crusaders to help you save your sister. It’s better odds if nothing else.”


	40. Cure

Ray Palmer returned to Starling late that evening. He’d been to a private meeting with his head researcher to survey new prototypes, but all he was interested in now was a drink and his bed. He only needed to lock the new reports in the CEO’s safe before he could go home.

When the elevator released him onto the executive floor, he tucked the files underneath his arm and dug his card key once more from his coat pocket. He felt his eyes widen and constrict, adjusting to the dim light as he walked to Felicity’s office. The reflections on the floor were the hardest to cope with. They were so much starker since the accident, streaks so bright he squinted directly beside near-utter blackness. Some orange light from the street and the city made it through the outer windows, but even that was muted. 

When his office door closed behind him, the hairs on the back of Ray’s neck stood. He forced his pupils to widen even as he squinted, straining in the darkness.

There. By his desk.

Two figures, nearly indecipherable from the shadows but once his eyes found them, they couldn’t blend back in again.

“I’m sorry,” Palmer said, his body tense but his stance easy. “I must have forgotten our appointment.” 

The Arrow stepped forward. He and the other had been in the darkest corner of the office.

“Ray Palmer,” he said, as if asking.

“You’re standing in my office. I expect you know who I am. You, of course, are the Arrow,” he said. He nodded to the other one, the one still in shadow. “And you are?”

A woman, tall and angular, stepped beside the Arrow, breaking the moon’s reflection on the floor. If possible, his shoulders widened at her motion, his bow opening to shield her and encompass her into his protection. Or to show off.

She wore green leather, like him, but cut close to her, with a small composite bow and a quiver of arrows on her back. Her light hair was pulled back into a bun and almost completely covered by a sort of leather helmet that hugged her temple, covered her crown, and ran down under her chin and around the back of her neck. In front of it all, a black rounded visor obscured her eyes.

“Artemis,” she said, her voice low and graveled like the Arrow’s. 

“A pleasure,” he inclined his head to her. “Now, what can I do for you both?”

“On your desk,” came the Arrow, “is a sample of a new drug being smuggled into schools.”

Palmer eyed the vigilantes but took the bait and found a small vial on the edge nearest him. He lay the folders on the tabletop. Any attempt to hide them would draw suspicion. Lifting the vial, he peered at it, shaking it slightly to make the granules slip sideways.

“I’ve heard about this,” said Palmer. “Vertigo, isn’t it?”

“Similar. This is a new recipe. After the hallucinogen wears off, victims become extremely susceptible to suggestion,” said the Arrow.

“Each time we encounter it, the after-effects are stronger,” continues Artemis. “We’re concerned that they’re trying to weaponize it.”

Palmer indicated the desk lamp. At the Arrow’s nod, he turned it on and knelt, turning the vial over beneath the beam.

He took a large breathe.

“What do you need from me?”

“An antidote,” said the Arrow.

Palmer uncapped the sample and wafted the air above it to his nose, taking a shallow breathe. Recapping the bottle, he expelled the air quickly several times, clearing his passages. 

“Queen Consolidated has several research divisions—”

“No,” the Arrow cut him off. “Off-the-books only.”

“Of course,” answered Palmer. “I meant that I will enlist one our top researchers.”

“No,” repeated Artemis.

Palmer peered at her, his attention prickling and he stood. She lifted her wrist and tapped something into an interface he hadn’t noticed. The lamp on the table cut out.

“Palmer Industries,” said the Arrow.

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve folded your former company into the research sciences division of Queen Consolidated. Off-books even to the board of investors. We want the antidote developed within that branch.”

Palmer tilted his head.

“I suppose it’s no use asking how you know about that.”

“Glad you see it our way,” said Artemis. He ignored her, leaning over his desk, the vial in front of him.

Running through their current projects, he considered the resources, already strained, and the intensity necessary to take on something else. He must keep the project in the folders under his hand running. He still needed to understand the changes to his biology. Two of the prototype compounds had proved promising in the rats. He could see some deviations in his own experiences, the change in his night vision for example, but he didn’t understand them.

“All right. I’ll set the entire division on it tomorrow,” he said, straightening.

Artemis smiled, then forced herself to pout. The Arrow nodded and answered, “We’ll be in touch.”


	41. Leap

“That was so fun,” Felicity whispered, clapping her gloved hands together. The muffled clop reverberated against the cement blocks as she followed her partner up the final flight of stairs.

The Arrow smiled, an upturn of the corners of his grim-set mouth.

“Stay calm,” he said, pushing open the exit door to the roof.

“But that was so cool,” she hopped once, crossing the threshold. “And I was there,” she danced behind him, making the gravel crunch beneath her knew-high black boots. “Finally, I was right there with you. Mask and everything.”

He shot her a look, which she subdued her until he faced the city again. She swung her hips into a strut.

“You did well,” he said.

The Arrow attached their harnesses to the zipline. She’d forgotten about this and stopped breathing properly. Not wanting him to see her sudden unease, Artemis stood in front of the Arrow. He double-checked the line, her harness, the clasp.

Across the intersection and three blocks, onto the roof of a parking garage. She could do that. Definitely. She stepped onto the ledge.

The lights popped before her, the wind had died to a breath.

She didn’t move. 

She was too afraid to shut her eyes. Her new visor, probably developed by Barry though she hadn’t looked the gift-Arrow in the mouth to ask, showed her the distance to the ground, to the nearest building, the angle of the moon, the horizon, her direction.

“Artemis?”

She needed to go. That was the plan. She’d jump, he’d jump. But she’d never done this before. Extreme ziplining hadn’t exactly been a prerequ at MIT.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded. She shook her head.

The Arrow stepped up beside her. He wrapped an arm around her waist and she pressed herself backward against him. 

“Have you ever dreamed you could fly?” he asked quietly.

Startled, she blinked several times. Lifting up her visor, she touched her mask underneath, and gazed at the fuzzy rooftops far away from her. She lowered her visor again and it adjusted for her prescription. Finally Felicity wet her lips and nodded. 

“Then keep your eyes open,” Oliver breathed. With his second arm also around her, he “Shhhh”ed in her ear and leapt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oliver stole Batman's line! (Batman and Robin #22.)


	42. Visit

When Spoiler returned to Gotham an hour before dawn, she found Red Hood standing on the fire escape opposite her living room window. The very fact that he waited in the open meant he wanted her to know he was there and meant he wanted to talk. She supposed. It almost definitely meant he didn’t intend to shoot her. But, then, it’s Red Hood. Volatile doesn’t begin to cover it.

After parking in the alley, she used a grappling gun to draw herself up to him.

“Red Hood,” she greeted him with a nod, crouching on the handrail. He kept his arms crossed, leaning against the brick wall with one foot propped up, but she could see his hands. A good sign.

“Spoiler,” he nodded. She stepped onto the platform.

“I’d invite you in for a beer, but I’m a little annoyed you found my safehouse.”

The fact that she couldn’t see any expression on his full-head mask, not even in his black-rimmed eyes, had always disturbed her.

He shook his head once, as if amused.

“What would Alfie say?” he asked. 

Ah. A cheery mood.

Spoiler shrugged with one shoulder, shifting her weight onto one leg.

“He knows I’m a hopeless case,” she said. The Red Hood sniffed. “You, on the other hand, other than not calling ahead, have been nothing but a gentleman so far. What can I do for you?”

He pushed himself off the brick with his massive black boot and stepped into a wide stance opposite her.

“The new vertigo got into two middle schools over the past three weeks. I stopped one caravan.”

“I heard. Thanks.”

Red Hood’s bicep twitched, slight beneath his leather and his persona and his struggles.

“I killed everyone I found,” he growled.

Spoiler’s diaphragm clenched around her lungs but she forced her limbs and face not to respond.

“I meant thanks for stopping the shipment,” she said. “Obviously I’m not glad you killed anyone.”

He didn’t argue. He never argued his methods with her. She never tried to make him. What could she say that everyone else hadn’t? Besides, Spoiler and the Red Hood worked together more often than almost anyone in the family knew. 

Many nights they found themselves at the same playgrounds, watching the same soccer practices disperse. Usually, once one noticed the other, they would split up again. Cover more territory and not get in each other’s way. Sometimes, however, the situation warranted a little backup.

“You’ve been playing rent-a-cop to the Arrows on this,” he said.

“You’ve been checking up,” she grinned. “Miss me that much?”

“Whatever you’re doing’s not working. Here,” he tossed her a thumbdrive. Stephanie caught it in her right hand. When Red Hood didn’t move, she held it up for scrutiny.

“What will I find here?”

“Maps and blueprints to their new operation site. They’re mass-producing.”

Her head shot up.

“Where? Gotham?”

“Starling.”

She squinted at him, head cocked slightly to the side.

“Why give this to me?” she asked. “You’ve gone further afield than Starling City to finish a case.”

He shrugged. “Gas went up this week.”

She watched him another moment but he didn’t move. Spoiler tucked the drive into her belt.

“Thanks,” she said. Red Hood leaned against the railing.

“Where’s your lover bird?” he said.

“You know him. Research never rests.”

Each had been driven, in their respective early years, to prove themselves. Jason had died with it and the need manifested differently since then. Stephanie had been encouraged out of it. Mostly. But neither one felt they had anything to prove to the other. 

“How about I grab us some breakfast from around the corner?” she said. 

“They aren’t open yet,” said Red Hood.

She smirked. “But they start baking at four. And Spoiler is a pre-dawn regular.”

Stephanie and Jason sat on the roof of her building, a box of donuts opened between them. Styrofoam coffees steamed on the ledge beside his hood and her helmet. Together they watched the sun rise over their city. Once the box and cups were empty, without saying goodbye or even acknowledging his companion, Red Hood stood and leaped into the alley.


	43. Kill

Spoiler and Arsenal followed up on the Red Hood’s intel. Stakeout only. No contact. No movement. Nightwing had been rigid and he doubted Spoiler would disobey him again. They’d had such an epic fight the night she’d followed him against Red Hood, their leader himself had had to break it up. They’d hidden their bruises from Team Arrow, but Dick could tell that even though Stephanie didn’t think she was wrong, she didn’t want to cross that bridge again soon. Meanwhile, the Arrow was distracted. He sparred, destroyed the practice dummy, then announced he was going to ride by a few of Thea’s old haunts. Particularly, he wanted to see if she might be at the Queen mansion.

“She probably won’t be there, you know,” Nightwing said, arms crossed.

“I have to see,” said the Arrow, stripping the model of his forest green suit.

“Sure. But what if she isn’t there?”

“We keep looking.”

“What if she is?”

“Then my sister is safe,” he snapped.

Tim glanced up from his computer, instantly tense. He read their tautness of their shoulders, hands, braced feet.

“When you find Thea,” Nightwing asked, “what do you plan to do about Merlyn?” 

“Malcolm Merlyn needs to die.”

Nightwing stepped in front of the hooded vigilante and pressed his face into Oliver’s, glaring with precisely restrained anger. He slammed Queen, his suit still unzipped, into the table. Like a gunshot, Diggle bolted toward them, his gun drawn. Felicity hadn’t seen and spun in her chair. Tim leapt into his chair and kicked himself over the table, over the desktop, and landed beside Felicity, running for his brother.

“There is a psychopath in Gotham,” Nightwing said, so low, jaw set and a vein in his neck throbbing in time to the tiny second hand across town on Diggle's wrist. “He murdered one of my brothers. A child.”

Tim rushed in front of the gun and put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Oliver glared murder up at his assailant but did not fight.

“Back off, Dick,” warned John.

“He shot the police commissioner's daughter,” Nightwing continued, “my best friend, through the spine and paralyzed her. He has murdered countless women and men and children. He has tortured me. He has tortured my brothers and sisters and friends. He finds it funny. He laughs. Really laughs. At the sport of watching us suffer and fight and die. But he is still alive. None of us have killed him. Not one. Not one person.”

He paused. Oliver did not answer. Tim pulled on Nightwing’s shoulder.

“Let him go,” he said. “Nightwing.”

Grayson ignored him. “Merlyn may have manipulated her and he has, I’m sure, hurt her. He killed people, including people you care about. But he is no worse than the worst in another city.”

“Do not,” growled Oliver, “tell me how to protect my family. Or my city.”

“I'm not. I'm telling you that you don't have to kill him. No matter what he's done. Not killing him does not mean that you don't love Thea.”

“Don't say her name.”

“I said back off, man,” Diggle said. “I will shoot you.”

The muscles around Oliver Queen's mouth flickered in and out of its extreme tension. Nightwing lifted a cool appraisal at John.

The Arrow butted him hard on the forehead, forcing him back. He threw a punch but Nightwing evaded it and tried to shove him back again. The Arrow took another swing, this time making contact with Nightwing’s ribs, and Diggle and Red Robin pushed their way into the center.

Nightwing backed two steps away, relenting to peace.

_They’re moving,_ said Arsenal. Every person in the Foundry stilled, listening. _They just loaded sixteen crates onto a white truck. And—I see him. It’s the Scarecrow._

“How heavily armed are they? How many men?” the Arrow asked.

_Twelve,_ said Spoiler. _Heavily armed but surprise is my element. It’ll be fine._

“Maybe you two should sit this one out,” said Diggle to Oliver and Dick.

The Arrow turned and strode for the door. Spoiler’s voice cut in, fast.

_They’re rolling. If we don’t get them in the Glades, we might lose them._

_I think we can take them,_ said Arsenal.

“Are you sure?” asked Nightwing. 

_We’ll get them on the road,_ said Spoiler.

Oliver could hear Spoiler’s bike rev and tires squeal. He grimaced at the sound.

Felicity’s voice came into his ears, but not from the comms. “Oliver, what are you going to do?”

He glanced around.

“I need to find Thea,” he breathed.

“What about the Scarecrow?” asked John.

“I can’t deal with the Scarecrow. I can’t think about him. I need to find my sister.”

A loud bang. A series of pops on the comms. Gunfire.

“Spoiler? Arsenal?” Nightwing said.

Silence. Nightwing swung himself over the railing and pounded up the stairs ahead of the Arrow, who was swinging his quiver over his head.

_They spotted us,_ said Arsenal. _They’ve veered into a main street. They’re heading for the bridge._

Cursing within him, Red Robin lifted his black cowl over his face, adjusting it by the harsh nose said, “We’re on our way” and followed Nightwing and the Arrow up to the dance floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had some trouble figuring out this scene, where in the narrative it should appear and where Nightwing and the Arrow should be when it takes place. I hope you like what I finally decided on! Thanks so much for reading! We're getting really close to the end now.


	44. Relentless

Arsenal had seen them fight, of course. He’d seen them angry. He’d seen them _on_. But nothing compared to the lightning swiftness and efficiency with which Nightwing, Spoiler, and Red Robin took out the Scarecrow’s men. They used tools, small bombs, grappling guns, and ropes in a ferocious fury to incapacitate every threat. He had tried not to be awed, to stand mouth ajar as they leapt, fell, soared, and of course fought.

The strangest part was the silence. They didn’t speak, to the thugs or each other. They even caught the now-unconscious bodies, lowered them gently, seemingly just to maintain the hush. They made almost no sound. They were a tiny dark trio of wind the pushed down everything it encountered. The archers helped, of course, but Spoiler especially delivered irrefutable justice. She, he imagined, still smarted from her first encounter with the villain.

Just before dawn, SCPD led a raid on the warehouse and discovered perps hanging everywhere, by ropes and wires from the rafters, the catwalks. The Scarecrow’d been taken, dosed with his own hallucinogen and screaming, for psychiatric evaluation. Detective Lance had even called Felicity to make sure they’d found the right number of “ornaments.”

Back in the Foundry, she hung up and stared, unseeing, past her monitor. Spoiler, who’d been dozing on the new sofa, shifted and opened her eyes.

“You’ve been really tired,” said Felicity, softly wheeling over to her. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Real life plus Gotham cases plus Starling cases plus Team Arrow. But I’m awake. Something up?”

Felicity’s eyebrows dropped low and pressed together over her nose.

“No.”

Spoiler gave her a look.

“I was just wondering,” Felicity said, nodding, “when the Scarecrow had you that first time, why wasn’t Red Robin the one who came to find you. Why Nightwing? Or why not both?”

The younger blonde nodded and settled her head on the pillow of one arm.

“He was abroad. In Hong Kong with one of our sisters. They didn’t tell him I was missing.”

“They didn’t tell him?” as Felicity, incredulous. Stephanie shook her head.

“Dating a fellow vigilante can get really complicated really quickly. There was nothing more he could have done than Nightwing could have. There was no need to tell him. Our leader made that call, but I’m sure Nightwing and everyone agreed.”

Felicity blinked, fast. “I don’t understand. How could they not tell your boyfriend that you were missing.”

“He would have come back if he’d known, but it was an important case. Black Bat needed him there.”

“Right,” she murmured. After a long pause she said, “I didn’t realize your family was so international.”

“Many talents: delegation, division of duties and information. While do you think we all have jobs at Wayne Enterprises? It helps keep us sharp.”

“You work at Wayne Enterprises, too?” asked Felicity. “I thought you were in college.”

“Kind of,” she said. “I’m a marketing intern this semester. I read people, figure out what they want, then come up with a way to give them that.”

When Felicity rolled herself back to her desk, Spoiler didn't try to keep talking. Instead, she rolled over and fell back asleep.


	45. Data

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm determined to post the final chapter before the Arrow premiere on Wednesday, so be warned! Rapid-fire updates ahead!

Nightwing, Red Robin, and Spoiler had to return to their cities. They came back in turns. When Oliver reminded Dick that the case was over and that he had no obligation to Thea, Dick crossed his arms. “You helped me find my sister,” he said. “Yours is just a little better at hiding.”

So Tim, Felicity, and John were alone in the Foundry late one night when Tim wheeled “his” chair over to her. 

“Seventeenth and Redmane,” he said as she opened the file he’d just sent to her desktop. A screengrab showed an empty brick storefront and a single parked car barely in frame. 

“The Glades?” Felicity asked. Tim enlarged the photo. A young woman was frozen midstride, walking from the light of the sidewalk into an alley. Felicity started, leaning forward. “That’s Thea.”

“You’re sure?” he asked. Felicity nodded and called to John.

Tim cut to the main footage file and scrolled to a time stamp that morning. They watched the youngest Queen walk along the sidewalk with a small plastic bag. She’d glanced over her far shoulder as she ducked into the alley.

“That’s her,” said Diggle.

“I think she’s on her own,” said Tim. “According to my program, she’s the only person to spend more than two minutes that alley in the past three weeks.”

“Is she there now?” asked Diggle.

“I can’t tell. The camera moves a couple times a day but this is the last I have of her.”

He brought up the live feed, showing scant feet of the alley’s entrance in the top left corner. John and Felicity locked eyes, mixtures of hope and hesitation. When he tucked his head, she read his firmness and formed her resolve into hope.

“Oliver, Roy,” Felicity spoke into her comm. “We may have a location.”

Red Robin took out his cell, turning his back to Felicity and John. 

“Hey," he said. "We may have found her. How soon can you come?”


	46. Dosed

Oliver wouldn’t wait. He sent Roy to the roof and kicked in the steel door. He stalked through the labyrinthine dark, listening, following the scuffling and hoping he wasn’t being led by rats.

A slam echoed to him from far ahead. A short scream. He wasn’t the only visitor.

Two shots rang out and a cry. The Arrow ran.

Malcolm Merlyn kicked the gun from Thea’s hand and pounced on her, knocking her head back against the wall. She lolled to the side, groaning, dazed. He wrapped one hand around her neck, pinning her to the cement block wall. Two tears had leaked onto her cheeks and Oliver slipped into the long room, edging nearer, working through the boxes and metal shelves, looking for a clear shot.

“You can’t survive on your own,” Merlyn said, holding her face between both hands. “You’re my daughter. You need me.”

Her eyes cleared.

“I’ve never needed you.”

She head-butted him and kneed him in the groin. When he lurched sideways, she planted her right leg in the center of his chest and forced him backwards. She seized a metal bar and swung it high over her head, but as she brought it down, Merlyn darted to her side and stabbed her in the neck.

“No!” the Arrow roared, burying an arrow in Merlyn’s back. The older man turned and sliced the next three out of the air with Thea’s bar.

“You, too?” Merlyn grinned, delighted. “It’s a family reunion.”

The Arrow charged him. Merlyn dashed a capsule on the ground, billowing black smoke into the room. Thea, eyes huge, held onto her neck and gasped. The Arrow continued to the wall and stood over her, muscles taunt, listening.

A rusty door swung open. On the opposite side of the space, a box slid a few inches. Above it all, Thea’s labored breathing, growing faster and shallower.

“What did you do to her?” the Arrow roared into the expanse.

“It’s nothing permanent.” Merlyn’s voice came to him as a whisper, impossible to pinpoint. “Just something to make her a little more compliant on our journey.”

“You are not taking her again.”

“That’s not up to you.” Oliver barely avoided the kick to his face and struck back. They ended up on the ground, grappling in the pitch, landing unseen blows and still the smoke did not dissipate.

Arsenal had had enough. He roared into the room. Unable to see his enemy, his ex, or his mentor, he threaded the edges of the room.

“Nightwing and Spoiler are two blocks away,” he called to the Arrow. A lie. 

“Get to Thea! Opposite the door,” he called back. Merlyn slipped out of his grasp and pounded him with two short blows on the side of the head.

Oliver kicked and caught his sister, who shrieked.

A final blow landed on the Arrow, a pricking of a needle into his neck. He struggled, bucked, and reached back to tear Merlyn’s head from his torso.

The room was finally beginning to clear. Roy stood over Thea, breathing too hard, searching, bow string taut. 

“Thea,” Oliver rasped, dragging himself toward her. She screamed. She would not stop.

Merlyn was gone.


	47. Collect

“Mr. Palmer.”

The CEO pivoted mid-step to face the voice. Artemis stood behind him in the darkness beside the restaurant. 

Glancing around, he approached, looking for the Arrow or Arsenal.

“How is the antidote progressing?” she asked.

“We’re in preliminary trials,” he said. “One formula in particular looks promising but it’ll be at least a couple of weeks before—”

“I need it,” she said, voice wavering slightly. 

He blinked, then froze to let his eyes adjust. They strained to pick up her shape but he was standing in too much light. He stepped forward, trying to get under the restaurant’s awning and out of the glare of the street light. She pressed herself into the darkness before catching herself.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “It’s a trial.”

“I need the antidote,” she repeated.

“Artemis,” he returned, firm. “I can’t be sure that it’s safe.”

He felt her glare pierce through her visor and he grinned, instinctive, as if he knew this feeling. Shaking himself, he squinted and stepped once more toward her.

Again, she backed away. 

In a voice smaller than he expected from a vigilante, she said, “I have to try. Please. Give it to me.”

He sighed, hands on his hips.

“It’s the Arrow, isn’t it? He’s been dosed.”

“Arsenal’s with him,” she said, keeping her head low but her arms lifted in entreaty, “Please, I need the antidote. Whatever you have.”

“Okay,” he said finally, forcing himself not to down look the bright street. “I live close by. We can take my car.”

“Actually,” she pointed to the crimson Audi that revved up behind him, driven by a man in a black cowl with a sharply pointed nose, “let’s take his.”


	48. Truth

When Thea opened her eyes she found herself lying on her back. Cinder blocks stacked beside her to a high grey ceiling and hanging florescent lights. Rolling her head to her right she squinted at tables, computers, and display cases full of green-tipped arrows.

Sucking in a breath, she threw herself toward the wall, pushing into the silver-grey upholstery of a long, well-stuffed sofa. Her head throbbed and lolled back as she forced herself to focus and to calm.

A figure moved into her periphery.

The Arrow.

Her diaphragm clenched and her limbs washed with cold.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Get the hell away from me,” she spat.

He held up one hand to her, placating. He wasn’t wearing gloves.

“No one here wants to hurt you, Thea.”

He’d said ‘no one.’ Not ‘I.’

Lifting her head slowly, the young woman forced her gaze beyond him, into the farthest shadows. Beyond the tables and cases were more figures, unmoving, masked, watching her. Roy and another man were hooded like the Arrow, in red and blue respectively. Another had a soft cloth hood. Purple. A woman, Thea realized with a start. There was another woman, wearing the same green leather as the Arrow, along with a dark visor. The last man wore a simple mask and a skin-tight suit with blue wings at his shoulders. She’d seen a couple of these vigilantes on tv lately, through the windows of restaurants and corner stores. They worked with the Arrow. But three of them she didn’t recognize at all. 

“Why am I here?” Thea demanded, pushing herself upright, glaring. The Arrow extended a hand but stopped himself before touching her.

“Take it slowly. Merlyn dosed you with vertigo.”

“No,” she fought the urge to lay down again. “I know vertigo. This isn’t that.”

“It’s been altered, increasing the potency of the hallucinogens and leaving victims highly suggestible. As if they have no will of their own.”

Thea swallowed. No wonder Merlyn’d injected her with it. She’d eluded him for almost a month. Now she needed to move again. Starling had been a bad idea, of course. But she’d just wanted to go home. Not that there was a home to go back to. Setting her jaw, Thea tried to keep the fright from your eyes.

“He dosed me, too,” said the Arrow quietly. “Arsenal and Apollo brought us back here. Artemis and Red Robin retrieved a test version of an antidote. They gave it to me. When I woke up okay, we gave it to you.”

She glared at him.

“Call him ‘Roy.’ I know it’s Roy.”

The woman in green spoke up, “We talk about ourselves in the third person more than is strictly healthy. He doesn’t,” she glanced at the blue hooded man beside her and finished in a smaller voice, “mean anything by it.”

The Arrow’s eyes flickered in her direction but he didn’t respond. Instead, he took a steel stool from under the table behind him and sat it a few feet away. Thea drew back from him, trying to visualize where the exit was. She knew she must have spotted it.

“What are you doing?” she asked. 

He lowered himself onto the seat, chin ducked to his chest. She could barely see the whites of his eyes below his hood.

Harsher, she said, “What do you want?”

“You asked me, over and over again, to tell you the truth. I didn’t.”

“What you are talking about?” she said, unblinking but with narrow eyes.

He tucked his ungloved hands inside his hood, lifting it over the crown of his head and letting it fall to his shoulders.

Her eyes widened to saucers.

He dragged his mask up and away.

“Ollie,” she breathed.

As the Queen children studied each other, one full of shock, the other of hope, Arsenal lowered his own hood and mask. Thea lifted her legs onto the cushion and hugged them.

“Have—” she swallowed. “Have you always been the Arrow?”

“Yes,” he said. “When I came back from the island, I was determined to fix everything. But I knew I needed to protect you. And Mom. And Laurel. Tommy. Walter. So I hid this from all of you.”

“You’re the vigilante.”

He nodded.

“I should have told you,” he said.

She swallowed again, trying to force the numbness away. Something akin to tears choked her voice.

“Why are you telling me _now_?” 

“Because,” he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and meeting her eye, “I want you to stay.”

The younger Queen blinked fast at the water in her eyes, the rush of relief, to know she’s wanted. But beneath it all, a stone grew hot within her.

“I love you,” her brother continued. “I’ve missed you. We’ve been searching for you for months. I want you to stay in Starling. And be safe. And try to be happy again. I know that means that we can’t have secrets anymore. At least, I can’t keep these kinds of secrets from you. So I’m coming clean.”

“Finally trust me enough?” she whispered. The bitterness leaked into the air.

“It was never about trusting you,” he said. “I thought it was the best way to protect you. And Mom. To keep everything separate.” He swallowed hard. “After Slade Wilson—I saw that you both would have been safer if I’d told you the truth. If we’d been a team, the three of us. I no longer believe that my past—our pasts—won’t come back to haunt us.”

Her face hardened and her hands tightened around her knees. She pushed them toward the floor.

“Mom’s dead because of that psycho. And neither of you told me the truth. Ever. Even after he killed Mom. Even about my real father.”

“I’m sorry, Thea,” he repeated. A single tear leaked out. He struggled, muscles flexing all over his face and neck and hands and shoulders. “It’s my fault. I know. But I love you. And I don’t want you to leave.”

She blinked away from him. When she could speak she asked, voice strained, “Who are these people?”

“My partners.”

“But who are they?”

“They decide who knows their identities. Those are not my secrets to tell.”

He braced for another attack but none came. 

Thea groaned and lifted her legs again. Resting her head on her knees, she breathed, considering, wrestling with her anger and her loneliness, the weeks hiding, the months with Merlyn, the years of lies. After a long time, she looked up at her brother. He hadn’t moved but the others were gone.

“Ollie,” she breathed.

“Yeah, Speedy.”

“I don’t want to leave either.”

He slid to his knees and wrapped both arms around her. She stiffened but she did not pull away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just 2 chapters left! Look for them tomorrow.
> 
> I'm also writing a one-shot series made up of bonus scenes from this fic. Let me know if there's anything you'd really like to see. Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading!


	49. Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last update! Enjoy!

The invitation arrived three months after Thea and Oliver moved into a penthouse near Queen Consolidated. They’d decided that they weren’t ready for the mansion yet. It had been their home, but it had also been their parents’ home, and neither of them were ready to face those specters in the halls. They also couldn’t afford to heat it. Or cool it. Or staff it. Much of their furniture had been sold. And the art. But a five bedroom penthouse was doable: Oliver’s room, Thea’s room, a gym, a home theater, and they’d compromised on the last bedroom by leaving it empty.

It remained so until Oliver went in there to tumble one Saturday morning and found Thea at the door, watching him. He’d shown her what he was doing. After a few false starts she’d been able to match him. Then, Thea found a cracked easel at the art gallery she’d gotten a job managing. She’d liked painting as a child, so she dragged her sheet across the hall and lay it out beside the central window. She used tea bags and the ink from every pen in the apartment to dye one of her t-shirts, draped over the easel, held on by hair clips. Oliver had offered to buy her canvas and paints and brushes, but she’d refused. Instead, she found construction sites on her randomly chosen routes home, took old wood and window frames back to the spare room. When she got her first check, she returned home not with bags of clothes as she once might have, but with rolls of cream-colored canvas and a staple gun.

Oliver liked to watch her paint more than she liked to watch him tumble on the blue mats lined in a row behind her. But the room became another space they could share and something to communicate about. Thea still didn’t talk about her months away and Oliver didn’t talk about cases or crimes.

She was sitting at her easel—the sacrificial sheet on the floor, tea bags in water-filled skillet and canvas stapled over a pane-less window frame—when Oliver came home for lunch. 

“Are you early?” Thea asked, blinking up at him, right hand dripping to her elbow with ginseng tea. She wore one of her brother’s dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up. She’d pilfered it after it developed a long slash across the lower left side. Someone had tried to mug an older man outside a coffee shop. The Arrow hadn’t been around but her brother had.

Oliver shook his head.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

She swept the ginseng bag twice more, finishing her thought, and dropped it into the skillet again. She wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and stood.

“This came for us today,” Oliver lay it on the edge of the table, text up. She read it as he pulled their lunch from the takeout bags he sat on his chair. The tiny table and mismatched chairs had been another dumpster-find of Thea’s. 

“Wayne Enterprises,” she read. “You do business with them?”

“I do.”

“You didn’t used to.”

“They weren’t interested in investing in Starling until recently. Would you like to go?”

“Me? Why me?”

“You’re invited,” he grinned and slid the envelope from beneath the card: _Oliver and Thea Queen_.

“They probably don’t actually mean me. Maybe you should take someone else.”

Oliver cocked his head to one side.

“Why wouldn’t they mean you? Walter will be there, too. He called me when I was in line. I think it could be fun.”

“A business party fun? That’s not the Ollie I know.”

He chuckled and pulled out her chair. She sat and he took his own seat across the tiny round table from her, pushing the plastic bag to the floor. They each opened their plastic to-go cases of sushi and removed the wooden chopsticks from their paper sleeves.

“You don’t know the W.E. representatives. I think you’d like them. And it’s been a while since you were able to go to a party like this.”

“It’s in Gotham. It’d take forever to get there,” she said.

“Two hours isn’t that bad. We could stay the night in Gotham and come back in the morning.”

Thea considered as she lifted her first rolls, mostly avocado and crab, into her mouth. In truth, imagining herself in Gotham, representing her family and her city amongst strangers at a glitzy party like her parents used to throw, make bile rise into her throat. She felt afraid. 

“What about Malcolm Merlyn?” she asked.

“I doubt he’s invited.”

“Ollie,” she said.

He breathed more deeply.

“I doubt he’d show up. And even if he did, you’d be safe. He’d never touch you.”

“He injected you last time. Roy tipped the scale. He was the only reason Merlyn didn’t take me.”

“Don’t worry,” said Oliver, ignoring the point that haunted him. “I know some of the people who are going to be there. Merlyn wouldn’t stand a chance. None of them would let him near you.”

“Are these the people who were in your base that time? When I woke up?”

He nodded. “Some of them live in Gotham, apparently. They’re going to be on high alert that night.”

She had to force her well-toned muscles not to jump and jitter. She’s been using the gym while Oliver’s out being the Arrow. It helps to calm her, to feel control. And tea-painting helps her release.

“I’ll go,” she said. “If you’re sure you want to.”

He nodded, trying not to smile too widely. “I do. I want to go with you.”

She sighed again and lifted another roll into her mouth. As she chewed she shook her hair out of its clip.

“This probably means you’ll need a new dress,” said her brother. Thea shrugged.

“I’m sure I can dig up one of my old ones.”

He considered her.

“Are you happy, Thea?”

Her eyes shot up at him. He smiled to let her know it was okay. Whatever she said, whatever she felt was okay.

“I—yeah,” she said. “Not as happy as I ever was, but happier than when I was gone. Happier than when you were gone. Why?” She smirked. “Do I seem _unhappy_?”

He mulled her reply before offering his own. “You just don’t seem to enjoy a lot of the things you used to. I know how rough it’s been for you, being back. I’m so thankful you’ve stayed. I love you. But, I wonder sometimes if you’re actually happy.”

“Ollie, we can’t afford to the things I used to enjoy.”

“On a smaller scale, and occasionally, we can.”

“I enjoyed our art. Now I work with great art every day,” she returned.

“Thea.”

“It’s not important, though,” she said, nearing exasperation. “No one in Gotham knows me anyway. I can wear an old dress.”

“But you don’t have to. We should be frugal for a while, but we don’t have to be Spartan. And I know how much you enjoyed shopping for gowns, planning parties with Mom. I want you enjoy this. Like you used to.”

Her crossed legs bounced under the table. She clenched her jaw, in and out, deciding. Her brother took another roll of sushi to his lips, his own form of waiting.

“What I really want,” she said finally, “is to be out there with you. Masked.”

Oliver’s eyebrows shot upward. As he listened, they lowered to a more casual surprise.

“I want to do some good for this city,” said Thea. “I don’t want to be here and know you’re out there. Merlyn trained me. And one way or another, however you count who my parents were, they all did terrible things. I can help.” 

He breathed deeply, looking at the dwindling sampling before him. 

“I’m worried,” he said. “I don’t know where Merlyn is. I haven’t seen your skills.”

“So evaluate me. Train me.”

“Would you be okay being on the team with Roy?”

She rolled her eyes.

His sister really had been doing remarkably well. Despite the rage he still sensed in her, the confusion, the bitterness, she had never let any one of those emotions fly open in front of him. She’d been controlled, careful, but genuine. Trust breeds trust, and he’d trusted her. 

He held back from her Artemis and Apollo, details of current cases, and the location of the Foundry. Letting her in would necessitate the handing over of all three of these. Admittedly, she had not asked for this information, though she knew he held these things back from her. She also knew that Merlyn’s manipulation might not be over or it might go deeper than they’d realized. She didn’t believe it, but it was possible. And Oliver wondered. He’d explained it their first night in this apartment. She’d been furious and strangely wounded by it. Too, she still held against him Wilson’s ability to get close to her, to their mother.

“Can I think about it?” he said. Thea bit her lower lip, studying his face, but nodded.


	50. Work

Dick found them first. 

“Mr. Queen,” he called as he wove his way through the crowds of investors, socialites, and a few family friends. The Starling son shook the man’s hand, surprised at his own warmth.

“Mr. Grayson, good to see you.”

“I’m so glad you could make it. Hell of a drive, isn’t it?”

“It was a bit long,” Oliver admitted.

“I take my motorcycle, if I can. Livens up those long stretches.”

“I’m sure,” Oliver laughed. He set his arm on Thea’s back and opened the other to his friend.

“Dick, meet my sister. Thea Queen. Thea, this is Richard Grayson, one of the two W.E. representatives to Starling.”

The young man took Thea’s hand and leaned over it with a roguish grin. Oliver just smiled, and Thea eyed her brother’s genuine enjoyment.

“One of two?” Thea asked, though she let a little smirk meet Dick’s gaze. She’d decided to wear an old dress after all, and had chosen a silver one that her mother had been particularly fond of.

“The other’s my younger brother. Tim.”

“One of several younger brothers, I hear,” said Oliver.

“True. There’s one,” he pointed to the only child in the room, wearing a tuxedo and speaking seriously to a pair of middle aged couples.

“He looks like you,” she said. Dick smirked and ignored Oliver’s questioning study of the boy.

“Good luck only. He’s a biological Wayne, all the rest of us are adopted, wards, something like that. Speaking of siblings I don’t share blood with…” Dick opened his right arm to Stephanie, who Thea recognized with a cringe, and an Asian woman in a floor-length black gown. 

Miss Brown wore a purple gown brocaded and cut low in the back with strings of rhinestones draped from shoulder to shoulder. Thea still didn’t like the blonde. She had no cause to like her. But Thea had been a bit of a witch when they met.

The other woman stood in full elegance, no frills, and Thea admired her confidence. She also had more natural presence than almost anyone Thea had ever seen. 

Stephanie took Oliver’s arms and, leaning forward, kissed him on the cheek.

“Oliver,” she grinned, pulling back. “And Thea. I’m so glad to see you both again.”

Thea gave a small smile and a “thanks.”

“This is our sister, Cassandra Cain,” Dick introduced the second woman. Dick repeated the Queens’s names for her. She nodded to them with kind eyes. Apparently, she showed the least emotion of her siblings.

“A pleasure to meet you,” said Oliver.

“She lives in Hong Kong,” said Stephanie. “She’s just back for a quick visit.”

“Would you like to go with me to get a drink?” Cassandra asked Thea. Her voice startled them all.

The blonde Queen opened her mouth, closed it, and answered, “Sure.”

Oliver smiled at his sister and the two women threaded themselves, side by side, through the room.

“So, Oliver. How’s life?” asked Dick. The other man laughed.

“Good. Surprisingly good.”

“You know,” Steph said with a pointed look. “You both could have brought dates.”

Oliver quirked his head at her.

“I wanted to see Felicity and Roy. I thought you’d bring them.”

Blinking he said, “If I’d known you had ulterior motives in inviting us, of course we would have planned a little better.”

Stephanie pouted and her brother chuckled.

“At least tell me Digg’s here,” she demanded.

Oliver shook his head.

She huffed and cracked one of her wrists. “You ruin all my fun.” 

“So does Damian,” mumbled Dick. “Excuse me.”

He touched his sister’s arm as he passed, making his way to the drinks table, where the smallest Wayne had slipped a flute of champagne behind his back. Stephanie rolled her eyes as Dick set a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Thea looks better,” she said to Oliver. “Has she decided on a name?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Oracle said you got her a suit,” she continued, quietly.

“How does she know? And the suit isn’t for her. It’s a spare for… Artemis.”

Stephanie blinked.

“Oh. Sorry,” she fell silent. When she spoke again, her voice had lightened. “We’ve been keeping the vaguest of eyes on Starling. Things look pretty calm.”

Before Oliver could answer, another voice did.

“Maybe we can get back up to Starling for a visit sometime,” said Tim, walking into the group with Walter and a broad, dark-haired man a step behind him.

Mr. Steele greeted his step-son with a handshake.

“Oliver, I would like you to meet Bruce Wayne,” said Walter. 

His handshake equaled his strong presence, an unmistakable but not overwhelming 'I am in control.' Cassandra certainly felt like Wayne’s daughter.

“I’ve looked forward to meeting you,” said the host. “My sons speak highly of you.”

“That’s generous of them,” quipped Oliver, making his host chuckle. “I’ve enjoyed getting to know them both over the past year.”

“Yes, all of your children are credits to you,” said Walter.

Mr. Wayne voiced his gratitude at the compliment.

Damian, with crossed arms, and Dick spoke to Thea while Cassandra slipped backwards through the crowd.

Walter continued, “They are each very talented. Stephanie even entertained us at the piano on one occasion.”

“Did she?” Bruce shifted his gaze to the blonde, shrinking into a passing glass of champagne. Steph was trying not to glare at Walter, who looked terribly pleased with himself, while Oliver suppressed a smirk.

“She was arresting,” Walter continued. To the woman he said, “I do hope you will play this evening? I noticed the piano.”

“Yes, she must,” answered her father.

“Oh, I don’t think so, Mr. Steele,” said Stephanie. “The circumstances are very different.”

“No, no. I must insist,” he said. To the other man he added. “With your permission?”

“Of course,” Wayne answered, laughing. Sputtering slightly, Stephanie opened her mouth for an excuse but Walter wouldn’t hear it. Instead, he led her away and Tim, shrugging, followed.

“They surprised me,” said Mr. Wayne after a moment. Stephanie sat at the piano, exchanging a few words with Walter. “I didn’t expect them to like Starling so much. Although, now that I’ve met your sister I see that they might have had a little extra motivation.”

Oliver smiled. Stephanie began a tune and Walter retreated to the massive stone fireplace. Her siblings and Thea flowed toward the notes.

“Actually, my sister’s been traveling most of the past year,” said Oliver. “She only returned a few months ago.”

“Traveling,” Wayne repeated. He studied Thea, who set her hands on the piano’s lid. She’d captured his oldest son’s charismatic attention. “I’m sure you’re glad to have her back.”

“Of course,” Oliver answered immediately, but when he met the man’s face, he found his shoulders rising, his knees bending, his whole body preparing for defense. There was nothing in Bruce Wayne’s appearance or tone that suggested danger, or judgment, or even undue awareness. And, yet, Oliver’s mind threw up a wall to push against him.

Wayne smiled and gestured to Stephanie, moving through her first piece with a striking focus.

“I knew she played, but I had no idea she could perform so well,” he said. “She seems to be giving voice to the unspoken emotions in the room.”

“Yes,” answered Queen. “She’s very perceptive.”

“My children continually surprise me. And I am not an easy man to surprise.”

They shared a chummy façade of a laugh.

“Dick plays as well,” said Oliver.

Bruce stepped back, a mixture of disbelief and something positive, akin to delight.

“Really? _My_ son plays.”

Oliver nodded once. Thea turned out of Dick’s hand and walked slowly around the piano to stand beside the youngest Wayne, who gave her a winning smile and Grayson a smirk.

“I’ll have to ask them to play a duet.”

Again, Oliver nodded, tucking his hands in his pockets. “You should. They seemed to enjoy playing last time.”

“I’m glad Thea came with you,” said Wayne. “I wasn’t sure that she would.”

“Oh?” Oliver picked both eyebrows up high. His host still observed the piano.

“One of my sons went traveling several years ago. He returned a very different man than the boy he’d been when he left. What he’d seen pained him. Made him angry. I didn’t know how to continue with him at first, since he directed much of his anger toward me.”

Curious at this admission, Oliver faced the man fully, studying him.

“I certainly lashed out at my parents when I was younger,” said Oliver. He glanced through the room, looking for the last Wayne child. “Traveling can be hard.”

“You won’t find him here,” Mr. Wayne said. “He still doesn’t get along with his brothers enough to come by. Or me for that matter. But every year, every party, I find myself hoping.”

“He lives in Gotham?” Oliver asked. 

“He does,” nodded Wayne. “He gets along with Stephanie and Damian all right most of the time, but Gotham’s big enough that his path rarely crosses with any of ours.”

Something niggled at the back of Oliver’s focus, trying to insert itself where it’d never been before. 

“As I said,” Wayne looked at the younger man with startling intensity. “I’m glad your sister came with you.”

Mr. Queen nodded. Wayne flashed him another billionaire smile and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me. I’ve just seen a friend I wish to speak to.” Wayne strode to a man with a thick mustache and glasses in a brown suit. When the billionaire smiled at the man, who carried himself tall but humble, Oliver realized that every other smile had been false. Publicity smiles. Social smiles. Only this one, Wayne looking at someone he must count as a friend, is genuine. 

No, not quite. He’d truly smiled at his children, all gathered with Thea around the piano. But it had been strained by something. Perhaps he saw his son, this wandered son, where Thea stood. She could have returned just like him. Some degree of her did. But how much? And was she ready for the field?

The Wayne progeny seemed to think so. They’ve taken it upon themselves to get to know her, to care about her, perhaps to babysit her a bit. And now, as Stephanie continued through a second song, Oliver realized that every one of them might be vigilantes. The boy certainly scowls like Robin. And Stephanie and Dick hadn’t defined what sort of sister Cassandra is to them, wherever she had slipped off to. 

Supposing they’re all vigilantes, and he’d ask Felicity to look up vigilantes in Hong Kong tomorrow, that meant every one of the Wayne children wear masks. They’re all probably in the same crime-fighting family. Oliver glanced at his host again.

No. 

He almost had to be.

Two sons and a daughter, all vigilantes. And who’d let that boy out on patrol by himself? Who had let Dick?

Their father.

Batman.

He had to be.

Blinked fast, looking sharply away, Oliver Queen skated back over everything the man had said to him. Everything they’d said about their leader. About their father. They’d spoken carefully. They talked about him like he is two different people. 

Felicity’s voice flicked into Oliver’s mind, “We talk about ourselves in the third person more than is strictly healthy.”

Stephanie and Dick said they’d been working on getting their leader to meet Oliver.

They must all approve of Thea. Enough to let them both into Wayne Manor.

Still, Thea’s been on edge. She hadn’t spoken much of what her time with Merlyn was like. She did worry about him coming back for her. And Oliver related, of course. Maybe Merlyn was her island. 

Thea looked up to find him watching her. He smiled. He crossed the room to her. When he arrived, she lifted her hand to grasp his and he leaned into her, kissing her on the temple. Dick, Damian, Tim, and Stephanie made a point of not watching them. Still, all but the child grinned and Oliver felt his own smile twist onto his face.

Stephanie’s fingers rebuilt the last tune into a new melody. She looked at Thea, down at the keys, at Oliver, down, at Thea. “What if I said I would break your heart?” she sang. “What if I said I had problems that made me mean?”

On she sang, her voice lifting and low, and as Thea listened, as Stephanie poured more and more emotion into the music, Thea leaned subtly into her brother. 

“You ought to know where I’m coming from. I was alone when I burned my home. And all of the pieces were torn and thrown. You should know where I’m coming from.”

When Stephanie finished, Oliver said “Your father requests that you and Dick sing a duet.”

“Betrayal,” Dick declared. The blonde Gothamite sighed and rolled her eyes. 

“Sit down,” she scooted over for her brother. He obliged but the smirk rose into his eyes before coming to his mouth. 

“Tim, you too,” he said. “Dami,” his voice sharpened at his youngest brother, whose scowl and turned step indicated his intention to leave. “One more song.”

“Tt.”

The boy slumped against the piano. A tall, lean man passing with a tray of glasses cleared his throat. Sighing, Damian straightened.

With Tim and Dick perched on either side of Stephanie, Dick pounded out the first cord, singing “Who’s going to save the world tonight?”

Stephanie and Tim leaped in on the fourth word, harmonizing, and adding their fingers to the rush of the song, the same song, the last song Steph and Dick sang at Walter’s.

“Who’s going to bring you back to life?”

Bruce, and his friend, gravitated with an icy smile toward them. Dick’s eyes laughed at the man who’d raised him. Stephanie and Tim jostled one another’s arms as they played. Cassandra made her way to Bruce’s other side.

Thea grinned. When the music ended, her brother leaned down to her. The other guests laughed and clapped.

“Yes,” he whispered.

Confused, she twisted to see him.

“Provisionally only,” Oliver warned. Biting her lip, Thea reached across him, hugging him across his middle like when she was a little girl. His kissed her on her crown. They’d start tomorrow. And he’d need a new bowl. Roy broke the last one. He’d text him about it later.

For the moment, he held on to his sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stephanie's song for Thea is "You Should Know Where I'm Coming From" by Banks. The last song is "Save the World / Don't Worry Child" by Pentatonix.
> 
> Thank you so, so, so much to all of you who sent Kudos and/or commented!!! I'm so humbled to hear that you've enjoyed this! I honestly never expected so many of you to stick with it when the fic just kept expanding. Your comments in particular really encouraged me. I'm grateful to each of you for reading. Thank you!!
> 
> ~Albi
> 
> The one-shot series has begun! I don't have a timeline for posting, but let me know if there's anything you'd really like to see in it.


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